He looked down at the carpet in front of the mirror.
He had gone over that area repeatedly with the vacuum until it was smooth; the carpet nape, already plush and expensive, had been a good quarter inch thicker by the time he was finished. No one had walked there since they had come back into the room.
And yet now as he stooped down, his eye discerned very rough traces of footprints. He hadn’t noticed them before because now the whole section was matted down, as if something had swept out... He slapped on his gloves, rushed to the mirror, pulling and prying around its edges. He yelled to Collin to get some tools while Russell looked on stunned.
Burton inserted the crowbar about midway down the side of the mirror and he and Collin threw all their weight against the tool. The lock was not that strong, depending on deception rather than brute strength to safeguard its secrets.
There was a grinding sound and then a tear and a pop and the door swung open.
Burton plunged inside with Collin right behind. A light switch was on the wall. The room turned bright and the men looked around.
Russell peered in, saw the chair. As she looked around, her face froze on the inner side of the mirror door. She was staring right at the bed. The bed where a little while before... She rubbed her temples as a searing pain ripped through her skull.
A one-way mirror.
She turned to find Burton looking over her shoulder and through the mirror. His earlier remark about someone watching them had just proven itself prophetic.
Burton looked helplessly at Russell. “He must have been right here the whole time. The whole goddamned time. I can’t fucking believe this.” Burton looked at the empty shelves inside the vault. “Looks like he took a bunch of stuff. Probably cash and untraceables.”
“Who cares about that!” Russell exploded, pointing at the mirror. “This guy saw and heard everything, and you let him get away.”
“We got his license plate.” Collin was hoping for another rewarding smile. He didn’t get it.
“So what? You think he’s going to wait around for us to run his tag and go knock on his door?”
Russell sat down on the bed. Her head was spinning. If the guy had been in there he had seen everything. She shook her head. A bad but controllable situation had suddenly become an incomprehensible disaster, and totally out of her control. Particularly considering the information Collin had relayed to her when she had entered the bedroom.
The sonofabitch had the letter opener! Prints, blood, everything, straight to the White House.
She looked at the mirror and then at the bed, where a short time before she had been on top of the President. She instinctively pulled her jacket tighter around herself. She was suddenly sick to her stomach. She braced herself against the bedpost.
Collin emerged from the vault. “Don’t forget he committed a crime being here. He can get in big-time trouble if he goes to the cops.” That thought had struck the young agent while he peered around the vault.
He should have thought a little more.
Russell pushed back a strong urge to vomit. “He doesn’t have to exactly go and turn himself in to cash in on this. Have you ever heard of the goddamned phone? He’s probably calling the Post right now. Dammit! And then next the tabloids and by the end of the week we’ll be watching him on Oprah and Sally being shot on remote from whatever little island he’s retired to with his face blurred. And then comes the book and after that the movie. Shit!”
Russell envisioned a certain package arriving at the Post or the J. Edgar Hoover Building or the U.S. Attorney’s office or the Senate Minority Leader’s office, all possible depositories promising maximum political damage — not to mention the legal repercussions.
The note accompanying it would ask them to please match the prints on it and the blood with specimens of the President of the United States. It would sound like a joke, but they would do it. Of course they would do it. Richmond’s prints were already on file. His DNA would be a match. Her body would be found, her blood would be checked and they would be confronted with more questions than they could possibly have answers to.
They were dead, they were all dead. And that bastard had just been sitting in there, waiting for his chance. Not knowing that tonight would bring him the biggest payoff of his life. Nothing as simple as dollars. He would bring down a President, in flames and tatters, crashing to earth without a chance of survival. How often did someone get to do that? Woodward and Bernstein had become supermen, they could do no wrong. This topped the hell out of Watergate. This was too fucking much to deal with.
Russell barely made it to the bathroom. Burton looked over at the corpse and then back at Collin. They said nothing, their hearts pounding with increased frequency as the absolute enormity of the situation settled down on them like the stone lid of a crypt. Since they could think of nothing else to do, Burton and Collin dutifully retrieved the sanitizing equipment while Russell emptied the contents of her stomach. In an hour they were packed and gone.
The door closed quietly behind him.
Luther figured he had a couple of days at best, maybe less. He risked turning on a light and his eyes went quickly over the interior of the living room.
His life had gone from normal, or close to it, straight to horror land.
He took off the backpack, switched off the light, and stole over to the window.
Nothing — everything was quiet. Fleeing from that house had been the most nerve-racking experience of his life, worse than being overrun by screaming North Koreans. His hands still twitched. All the way back, every passing car seemed to bore its headlights into his face, searching out his guilty secret. Twice, police cars had passed him, and the sweat had poured off his forehead, his breathing constricted.
The car had been returned to the impoundment lot where Luther had “borrowed” it earlier that night. The plate would get them nowhere, but something else could.
He doubted they had gotten a look at him. Even if they had, they would only know generally his height and build. His age, race and facial features would still be a mystery, and without that they had nothing. And as fast as he had run, they probably figured him for a younger man. There was one open end, and he had thought about how to handle that on the ride back. For now, he packed up as much of the last thirty years as he could into two bags; he would not be coming back here.
He would clear out his accounts tomorrow morning; that would give him the resources to run far away from here. He had faced more than his share of danger during his long life. But the choice between going up against the President of the United States or disappearing was a no-brainer.
The night’s haul was safely hidden away. Three months of work for a prize that could end up getting him killed. He locked the door and disappeared into the night.
Chapter Four
At seven A.M. The gold-colored elevator doors opened, and Jack stepped into the meticulously decorated expanse that was Patton, Shaw’s reception area.
Lucinda wasn’t in yet, so the main reception desk, solid teakwood and weighing about a thousand pounds, and costing about twenty dollars for each of those pounds, was unmanned.
He walked down the broad hallways under the soft lights of the neoclassical wall sconces, turned right, and then left and in one minute opened the solid-oak door to his office. In the background, a smattering of ringing phones could be heard as the city woke up for business.
Six floors, well over one hundred thousand square feet in one of the best addresses downtown housing over two hundred highly compensated attorneys, with a two-story library, fully equipped gymnasium, sauna, women’s and men’s showers and lockers, ten conference rooms, a supporting staff of several hundred and, most important, a client list coveted by every other major firm in the country, that was the empire of Patton, Shaw & Lord.