“Got it. How long will the drive take from Calais?”
“That depends on how often you stop. If you hurry… six hours.”
Reeve did a quick calculation. If he didn’t encounter congestion or construction, he might make it to the south coast in eight or nine hours. He could sleep on the boat, then another six hours. Add a couple of hours for sailing, embarkation and disembarkation, plus an hour because France was one hour ahead… seventeen or eighteen hours. He’d flown to Los Angeles in about half that. The luminous hands of his watch told him it was a little after eight.
“Late afternoon,” he said, allowing himself a margin.
“I’ll be waiting in the station at four,” she said. “I’ll wait two hours, best look for me in the bar.”
“Listen, there’s one more thing. They recorded your call; they know your name now.”
“Yes?”
“I’m saying be careful.”
“Thank you, Mr. Reeve. See you tomorrow.”
His money was finished anyway. He put down the receiver, wondering how they would recognize each other. Then he laughed. He’d have driven a thousand miles straight; she’d recognize him by the bloodshot eyes and body tremors.
But he was worried that “they” would know she’d called. He should have destroyed the transmitters as soon as he located them. Instead, he’d tried playing games, playing for time. These were not people who appreciated games. He pushed the lightbulb home and opened the iron-framed door.
One more thing worried him. The private eyes. They were working for an outfit called Alliance, an American outfit, and he had no idea who’d hired Alliance in the first place.
Plus, if Lardface and Spikehead hadn’t planted those bugs… who had?
TWELVE
JEFFREY ALLERDYCE WAS LUNCHING WITH one of the few United States senators he regarded with anything other than utter loathing. That was because Senator Cal Waits was the only clean senator Allerdyce had ever had dealings with. Waits had never had to call on Alliance’s services, and had never found himself under investigation by them. He didn’t appear to be in any corporation’s pocket, and had little time-at least in public-for Washington’s veritable army of slick besuited lobbyists.
Maybe that was because Cal Waits didn’t need the money or the attention. He didn’t need the money because his grandfather had owned the largest banking group in the Southwest, and he didn’t need the attention because his style in the Senate got him plenty of that anyway. He was a large middle-aged man with a store of homespun stories that he was keen on recounting, most of them very funny, most of them making some telling point about the subject under discussion in the Senate. He was always being quoted, sound-bitten, edited into fifteen seconds of usable television for the midevening news. He was, as more than one newspaper had put it, “an institution.”
They ate at Allerdyce’s favorite restaurant, Ma Petite Maison. He liked the crab cakes there; he also had a 10 percent share in the place (though this was not widely known), and so liked to keep an eye on business. Business wasn’t bad, but at short notice Allerdyce had still been able to get a booth, one of the ones at the back usually reserved for parties of five or more. A journalist from the Wall Street Journal had been moved to one of the lesser tables, but would be kept sweet by seeing his eventual tab reduced by 10 percent.
Allerdyce couldn’t tell Cal Waits that he’d had someone moved. Some luncheon companions would have been impressed, honored-but not Waits. Waits would have protested, maybe even walked out. Allerdyce didn’t want him to walk, he wanted him to talk. But first there was the other crap to be got through, the so-called excuse for their lunch engagement: catching up on family, mutual acquaintances, old times. Allerdyce noticed how some of the other diners stared at them, seeing two scarred old warhorses with their noses in the feedbag.
And then the main courses arrived-cassoulet for Waits, magret d’oie for Allerdyce-and it was almost time.
Waits looked at his plate. “The hell with healthy eating.” He chortled. “This health kick we’ve been on for the past-what?-twenty years: it’s killing this country. I don’t mean with cholesterol or whatever new bodily disaster or poison the scientists are coming up with, I mean people aren’t eating for fun anymore. Dammit, Jeffrey, eating used to be a pastime for America. Steaks and burgers, pizzas and ribs… fun food. Surf ‘n’ turf, that sort of thing. And now everybody looks at you in horror if you so much as suck on a drumstick. Well hell, I told my doctors-you notice you don’t just need one doctor these days, you need a whole rank of them, same thing with lawyers-I told them I wouldn’t diet. I’d do anything else they told me to do, but I would not stop eating the food I’ve been eating my whole goddamned life.”
He chewed on a fatty piece of ham to prove his point.
“How much medication are you on, Cal?” Allerdyce asked.
Cal Waits nearly choked with laughter. “About a bottle of pills a day. I got little pink ones and big blue ones and some capsule things that’re white at one end and yellow at the other. I got red pills so small you practically need tweezers to pick them up, and I got this vast pastel tablet I take once a day that’s the size of a bath plug. Don’t ask me what they do, I just gobble them down.”
He poured himself another half-glass of ‘83 Montrose. Despite hailing from California, Waits preferred the wines of Bordeaux. He was rationed to half a bottle a day, and drank perhaps twice that. That was another reason Allerdyce liked him: he didn’t give a shit.
Allerdyce could see no subtle way into the subject he wanted to raise, and doubtless Cal would see through him anyway. “You were raised in Southern California?” he asked.
“Hell, you know I was.”
“Near San Diego, right?”
“Right. I went to school there.”
“Before Harvard.”
“Before Harvard,” Waits acknowledged. Then he chuckled again. “What is this, Jeffrey? You know I went to Harvard but pretend you don’t know where I was born and raised!”
Allerdyce bowed his head, admitting he’d been caught. “I just wanted to ask you something about San Diego.”
“I represent it in the Senate, I should know something about it.”
Allerdyce watched Waits shovel another lump of sausage into his mouth. Waits was wearing a dark-blue suit of real quality, a lemon shirt, and a blue silk tie. Above all this sat his round face, with the pendulous jowls cartoonists loved to exaggerate and the small eyes, inset like a pig’s, always sparkling with the humor of some situation or other. They were sparkling now.
“You ever have dealings with CWC?”
“Co-World Chemicals, sure.” Waits nodded. “I’ve attended a few functions there.”
“Do you know Kosigin?”
Waits looked more guarded. The twinkle was leaving his eyes. “We’ve met.” He reached for another roll and tore it in two.
“What do you think of him?”
Waits chewed this question over, then shook his head. “That’s not what you want to ask, is it?”
“No,” Allerdyce quietly confessed, “it isn’t.”
Waits’s voice dropped uncharacteristically low. His voice box was the reason Allerdyce had needed a table away from other diners. “I feel you’re getting around to something, Jeffrey. Will I like it when we arrive?”
“It’s nothing serious, Cal, I assure you.” Allerdyce’s magret was almost untouched. “It’s just that Kosigin has hired Alliance’s services, and I like to know about my clients.”
“Sure, without asking them to their face.”
“I like to know what people think of them, not what they would like me to think of them.”