That haunted him all the way out to Woodlawn.
But in the end, it was the press photographers he remembers most, the flashbulbs, dozens of them, all going off like so many tiny explosions, and then these grubby little men with their pencil stubs and notepads.
Who are these people, he remembers thinking at the time.
Who indeed.
He trawls through a few more reports. At this stage, the main focus is on J.J. and his trip to Paris. Was there really a motorcycle accident? Was there really a motorcyclist? The search is well and truly on now and that can only end one way.
In tears.
But Vaughan knows that the background stuff will come into focus as well, sooner or later, and that it won’t be long before the word Buenke is on everyone’s lips.
Thanaxite, too.
It’s a damn shame.
He checks his phone – a text from Meredith, who’s in LA for a few days, and due back tomorrow. Then three voice messages and four texts, all from Clark.
Oh dear.
He deletes them, and turns to go.
What exactly is it about the phrase You’re on your own, he wonders, that Clark didn’t understand?
Tom Szymanski paces back and forth between the window and the bed. In this hotel room he can do that, there’s enough space, unlike where he stayed before, in midtown, which was cramped, but at least there he was free to get shitfaced, bring a hooker back, whatever. Here he feels constrained, like he’s supposed to be on his best behaviour or something. It’s only been twelve hours since the interview in the coffee shop and already, already, he’s acquired an entourage – legal advisors, media handlers, a fucking bodyguard. He probably hasn’t gone about all of this in the best way possible – but in his defence, how was he supposed to know what to do, or say? This isn’t exactly the kind of shit he’s been trained for. Anyway, twenty minutes after Ellen Dorsey posted the interview on her webpage and did whatever Twitter shit it is that people do these days, a couple of photographers showed up, then a local news crew. Dorsey seemed a bit alarmed herself by how fast it was all happening, but then she tried to make out like it was better this way, that if he had his photo out there, his mug in the public domain, he’d be better protected, it’d be the perfect deflector shield against the very powerful and influential people he had chosen to go up against.
What the fuck?
He hadn’t chosen to go up against anyone, it had all just happened, and continued happening, inside the door of the coffee shop, then outside on the street, moving along the sidewalk, more and more people arriving, so that pretty quickly it became a circus, and he got separated from Jimmy Gilroy and Ellen Dorsey and her lawyer, and before he knew it… shit, before he knew anything this other woman was shoving a business card into his hand and asking him how’d he like to go on the Evening News with Katie Couric, or do 60 Minutes, or if the sound of a nice, juicy book contract appealed to him at all? If she hadn’t been so gorgeous he might have moved on, but really, this woman was like a fucking movie star, with the eyes, and the lips, and the hips, and the OMG rack, and before he could catch his breath he was sitting next to her in the back of a town car, riding up here to this hotel…
For a series of… meetings…
It crossed his mind at one point that she might be a Gideon plant, but no, thinking about it, Ellen Dorsey had been right – with the interview out there on the web, and his name, and his history, and pictures now too, actual footage of him on Third Avenue from that morning, BRX and Gideon wouldn’t be so stupid as to go anywhere near him.
This Zambelli woman was on the level, she was a bona fide PR princess with a pair of stones on her that would put any man to shame.
She’d nabbed him, for Christ’s sake.
Look at him.
Holed up in a fucking executive suite, waiting for a deluxe cheeseburger he ordered and watching himself on TV, while out there, in the other room, some grand strategy is being devised, tomorrow’s assault on the world’s media.
He stops at the window and looks out at the shimmering lights of Manhattan’s upper east side.
What’s he doing here? What’s his strategy?
He doesn’t know.
It felt weird bailing on Jimmy Gilroy and Ellen Dorsey like that, but then, what does he owe them? He did their interview, gave them their scoop.
He turns away from the window.
What does he owe anyone for that matter? What does he owe the various people who’ve been trying to contact him since early afternoon apparently, looking to hook up with him? So-called friends, family members – and obscure ones, too.
His ex-brother-in-law?
Jesus Christ.
He doesn’t owe them anything.
He looks over at the end of the bed.
He still has his gun. It’s in the pocket of his leather jacket there.
He could…
What?
Flip? Work himself up to it? An improvised frenzy, right here in the bedroom maybe? Or how about downstairs in the lobby? Or live on-air in some TV studio? Take his new movie-star girlfriend with him and go out in a blaze of glory?
Yeah.
He wishes he were that insane. It’d be a lot easier.
On Fox now they’re showing clips of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, some big hotel, streets, traffic.
The special correspondents, it would seem, are on the case, arriving into the city in their droves. It won’t be long before they start arriving in Congo as well, and chartering small private planes to take them as near to the remote village of Buenke as they can get.
And it won’t be long before everything Tom Szymanski said in his interview is checked and verified – Ray Kroner going postal and killing all those people, then Senator Rundle getting his hand crushed in the door of an SUV.
That chiefly.
But it won’t stop there, it occurs to him, the coverage, the attention, not by a long shot – and it’s going to take all his reserves of sanity to get through it.
All his reserves of energy.
Speaking of which.
He looks over at the door.
Where’s that fucking cheeseburger he ordered?
Over on the west side, standing at a window of his apartment on the fifty-seventh floor, glass in hand, Clark Rundle gazes down at the jewel-encrusted city spread out below like a vast, magnificent cache of pirate’s booty.
After a while, and abruptly, he shifts focus and gazes into his glass.
Single malt Scotch whisky. This is the fourth or fifth one he’s had, he thinks. He’s not a big drinker, but he knows that he’s reached a tipping point here, the sensation in his stomach – this little red-hot coal of euphoria, burning steadily now for maybe the last twenty minutes – is due to subside, and fade.
Inevitably.
Leaving him with the dying embers of…
Oh please.
There. You see?
It’s gone.
He drains his glass and turns away from the window.
The room before him is enormous, like a downtown loft space – furnished in a minimalist style, with wide, pine floorboards, a couple of bare leather couches, a tinted glass coffee table and two large, modernist canvases hung on walls at either end.