She had promised him. She sat up abruptly in bed and lifted the telephone off the bedside table and placed it in her lap. She picked up the receiver, dialed the switchboard, and asked the operator to ring the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
Chapter Fifteen
Tillman was sweating as he made his way through customs at John F. Kennedy Airport. He wasn’t stopped, which surprised him. If anyone looked nervous, he did. His luck seemed to be holding. He looked anxiously around him as he strode briskly through the concourse. Once outside he made for the nearest yellow cab and told the driver to take him to Grand Central Station. The driver finished the Hershey bar he was eating then switched on the meter and started the engine.
Tony Varese had tailed Tillman discreetly through the airport from the moment he was cleared through customs. He climbed into the back of another yellow cab and told the driver to follow Tillman. The driver, an expatriate Italian who regularly worked for the Germino family, put the cab into gear then pulled out into the road and followed the quarry at a safe distance.
Tillman told the driver to wait for him once they reached Grand Central Station. He wouldn’t be long. When he returned he had a pale blue holdall with him. He thought momentarily about going back to his apartment to collect a few personal things but quickly dismissed the idea. It would be too dangerous. He couldn’t afford to take any unnecessary risks. He still hadn’t decided on his ultimate destination. El Salvador? Guatemala? Honduras? It didn’t matter. He could decide that later. All that mattered now was getting out of the country. He knew he couldn’t use any of the major airlines. How would he explain away the five hundred thousand dollars in the holdall? No, it was time to call in a favor. He told the driver where he wanted to go.
Judd Miller’s boast was that if it had wings and an engine, he could fly it. He had yet to be proved wrong. He had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam in the sixties, Hercules transport planes in war-torn Africa in the seventies and a variety of light aircraft in Central America in the eighties. During that time he had also served a total of fourteen years in prisons around the world on a variety of charges ranging from gun-running to attempted murder.
He had returned to the States in the late eighties and opened a small flying school outside New York, but a costly divorce a year later and mounting debts had taken the company to the brink of bankruptcy. He had been forced to sell one of his planes earlier in the year to pay off some of his creditors and then the previous month had laid off his secretary and two of his three mechanics because he couldn’t afford to pay their wages anymore. He knew it would only be a matter of time before the company was wound up. Not that it bothered him. He’d had enough of teaching anyway. It was time to move on again. He knew he could get a job in any number of countries. He’d already put out feelers and now all he had to do was wait until the right offer came along …
He was sitting in his office, his feet on the desk, when the yellow cab pulled up outside the door. The driver removed a suitcase from the trunk and dumped it on the ground. Miller cursed angrily. He wasn’t running a charter service. He was about to swing his legs off the desk and go outside when Tillman got out of the cab. Miller recognized him straight away. He raked his fingers through his greasy hair. What the hell was going on?
He had first met Tillman in the early eighties. He had been serving a three-year sentence in a Nicaraguan jail for running arms to the Contras; Tillman had been a highly respected foreign correspondent with the New York Times. Even though they had little in common, apart from a mutual hatred of international communism, their paths had crossed several times over the next few years. Then Tillman had returned to the States and Miller hadn’t heard of him again until a recent NBC special about Jack Scoby’s historic victory in New York State. Tillman was there. The brains behind the campaign. The puppeteer. But now it seemed that the strings had suddenly been cut from underneath him …
Tillman paid the driver then waited until the taxi had left before entering the small office. “You remember me, don’t you?”
Miller nodded slowly. “Sure. The smart-assed journalist turned political manipulator. You did a good job on Scoby. You even got me to vote for him. And I’ve never voted before in my life. Pity it turned out to have been a wasted vote though.”
“Then you know what happened?”
“It’s all they’ve been reporting on the radio this morning.” Miller clasped his hands behind his head. “I’d have thought you’d have been big news right now. There must be journalists out there who’d sell their children to get an exclusive with you. So what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m calling in the favor you owe me,” Tillman replied sharply.
“And which favor would that be?”
“Don’t screw me about, Miller. You know damn well what I’m talking about. I got you out of Honduras after your plane had been shot down by the guerrillas. If they’d have got hold of you, you wouldn’t be here today.”
“Oh, that favor? I guess I do owe you something for bailing out my ass. What do you want?”
“I want you to fly me to Central America. It doesn’t matter where at the moment. Just get me out of the States.”
A look of disbelief crossed Miller’s face. “Fly you out to Central America? Just like that?”
Tillman cleared a space on the desk for the holdall then opened it and removed two packs of ten thousand dollars and tossed them into Miller’s lap. “That’s for the hire of the plane, all fuel expenses and for your time. I think you’d agree that twenty grand is a more than reasonable amount.”
Miller picked up one of the packs and fanned the money with his thumb. “I’m intrigued. Scoby’s assassinated and suddenly you have to flee the country in a hurry. What the hell’s going on, Tillman?”
Tillman tossed another ten thousand dollars on the table. “Thirty grand. No questions asked.”
“How much blood money have you got in there?”
“I said no questions asked,” Tillman snapped.
“You must have quite a bit there if you can afford to throw around thirty Gs. Let’s say fifty Gs and you pay for the fuel as well. Deal?”
“Deal,” Tillman replied tersely.
“How can you make a deal with money that doesn’t belong to you?” Varese said, appearing in the doorway. He had a silenced Heckler & Koch automatic in his hand.
“Who the hell are you?” Miller snapped, swinging his legs off the desk.
Varese eyed Miller disdainfully then raised the automatic and shot him. Tillman stumbled backward against the wall, the holdall clasped to his chest as if it would somehow shield him from the next bullet.
“Fifty grand to take you to Central America?” Varese said, glancing down at Miller’s body. “I’d say he was dealing you from the bottom of the deck on that one.”
“We can make a deal, Varese,” Tillman said in desperation, stuffing the thirty thousand dollars back into the holdall. “You can say you never found me. That way you’d get to keep all the money for yourself. Half a million. It’s a lot of money. I won’t talk. You know that. I’m in this just as deep as you are. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a prison cell. Take the money. Take it all. Just let me go.”
“I know you wouldn’t sing to the authorities but what if the Colombians got hold of you? They’d certainly torture you and you’d end up telling them all about Mr. Navarro. And then they’d be sure to retaliate against the family. The Colombians are particularly bad losers. And then we’d have to retaliate so as not to lose face. It could all turn very nasty. And all because I let you go.”