“I don’t think you’re in any position to start dictating terms, lady,” Whitmarsh said but he spoke just a little too fast, his voice just a little too tense. It gave the lie to his confident words.
“Oh really?” I said. “OK, let me phrase that slightly differently for you, Jim. What’s it worth to you to get hold of him when he’s still alive and kicking, rather than shot in the stomach and dropped into a swamp?”
Another long pause. “News travels fast, huh?” Whitmarsh said then. He laughed again, dustier this time, with more strain showing through it. “Thought it might make you lose your nerve and wanna throw in the towel.”
I thought of how close I’d come to doing just that, on the beach after we’d left Walt’s place this morning. The memory of my own misery and helplessness hardened something inside me. I would see this through and I would bring them down, whatever it took.
“Well you thought wrong, didn’t you,” I said.
“So what do you want?”
“What do I want?” I repeated, letting my voice slip, introducing the rough note of someone pushed close to the edge. It didn’t take much faking. “I want to get out of this fucking country and go home,” I said, flat. “But I can’t do that unless I have something to bargain with. Give me Keith. You don’t need him any more.”
“Who says we have Keith?”
“Oh come on, Whitmarsh,” I snapped. “You took him from the house Thursday morning and you’ve had him ever since. You must have had plenty of time to copy all his files and notes. Long enough to realise the program isn’t complete. And I know Henry told you about Trey’s work on the neural net. You need the kid and you don’t need Keith. Let me have him.”
Whitmarsh didn’t say anything immediately. Gerri started to react but I waved her to silence with a curt gesture and added, “Come on, this is a one-time-only deal. Make a decision.”
“OK, Charlie,” he said and I could tell by his voice that I wouldn’t be able to trust him. “I guess we can do that. When and where you wanna make the exchange?”
For a second my mind went blank, then I remembered the Ocean Center complex. Above the main hall where the show itself was taking place were rows of deserted seating, all fed by corridors and walkways.
“Meet me upstairs at the Ocean Center on Atlantic Avenue,” I said. I checked my watch. “You’ve got an hour.” And with that I cut the connection, not giving him a chance to argue.
As I put the phone down both Brown and Gerri Raybourn peeled their earpieces out and put them down on the desk top. I raised an eyebrow at the pair of them. Well?
Gerri dipped into the lavender handbag and produced a pack of Kools. She picked one out and lit it with hands that didn’t look quite as steady as they had done before I’d made my phone call. She inhaled deeply with all the fervour of a lapsed quitter, closing her eyes briefly.
Brown looked pained but too polite to ask her not to smoke in his office. Instead he shifted his empty coffee cup back onto the tray and put the saucer in front of her. She distractedly flicked her first buildup of ash onto his carpet anyway. Then she looked up, her eyes skating from one to the other of us in turn, hunted.
“Jim was just leading her on, trying to recover the boy,” she said but even she didn’t sound like she entirely believed it. The references to Sean were conveniently overlooked altogether. She took another drag on the cigarette and the nicotine seemed to build her tattered confidence. I could see it swelling like a reinflating doll until her skin seemed tight with it. “Of course he doesn’t have Keith to trade. It’s ridiculous.”
Brown cleared his throat. “Well,” he said slowly. “I guess there’s one way to find out.” He looked over the top of us to where the two heavies who’d come to his rescue were still loitering. “Tool up, Mason, and grab another couple of the boys,” he said to them. “We’ve got less than fifty-five minutes to get up to Daytona Beach.”
Twenty-one
I sat in the rear of a huge Chevy Suburban with blacked-out glass as it barrelled north up A1A towards Daytona Beach. Alongside me, hunched as far away as she could manage so as to avoid possible contamination from contact, was Gerri Raybourn. She sat with her knees pressed tight together and her face stiff with outrage.
In the front passenger seat was Livingston Brown, acting like a kid on a big adventure. Mason, the security thug with the pencil moustache, was behind the wheel. Following, at a distance that made it look like they were attached by a short tow rope, was a Transit-sized Chevy van with another three heavies inside. The big black man with the Colt was driving but nobody had told me his name.
Half the reason for Gerri’s indignation was that we were making this journey at all. She had done everything possible to talk Brown out of it, even resorting to pointing out that he was too old for such a foolish and possibly dangerous escapade. That kind of comment had done little to bring him round to her way of thinking.
The other half of the reason was lying across my knees, squeezed with Walt’s clandestine tape recorder into the little flowered bag.
As soon as it had become clear that Brown was starting to come down on my side of the fence, I’d asked for the return of my gun. He’d given me a long hard stare. Eventually he’d quietly signalled Mason to hand over the SIG, ignoring the other woman’s strident objections.
The security man did so with obvious reluctance, as though he agreed with Gerri’s opinion of me. Nevertheless, he was well-trained enough not to voice such doubts. They all watched silently as I pointedly dropped the magazine out and checked he hadn’t palmed the remaining rounds while he was out fetching coffee. He hadn’t.
So I still had a whole two bullets to play with.
It wasn’t much, particularly when – if Whitmarsh turned up with both Chris and Lonnie – I potentially had four people to shoot at. My gaze skimmed over Gerri again. I hadn’t seen a gun on her and she’d made no moves to reach for one when I’d ram-raided the office.
If it came to it, I decided coldly, I’d leave her for last and take my chances hand-to-hand. I probably owed her a good smack in the face.
Besides, I now had half an army for back-up. Brown had seen our surprise when his professional-looking bunch met us at the front door to the clubhouse and he’d grinned. “I had a whole heap of trouble with people stealing machinery and materials during construction on this place,” he said over his shoulder as we rolled out. “They’re smart and they’re organised and it was costing me a small fortune. Since I took on Mason and the boys I haven’t lost a cent. It don’t do no harm to be prepared for the worst.”
And prepared for the worst they were. Although nothing was visible I could tell each man was carrying a sidearm of some description. Two of them had a shoulder holster leaving a telltale bulge under the armpit of their lightweight zip-up jackets. The black guy with the Colt appeared with a long gym bag that clanked metallically when he placed it in the back of the van.
We didn’t talk much on the drive up. Brown switched the radio on and tuned it to a station playing country and western music. He hummed along tunelessly to every song, his hands tapping out cheerfully bad time on his thighs.
I shut my ears to the sound, gazed sightlessly out of the window, and thought about Sean.
It was only then that it began to fully sink in that I faced a whole future without him. It was the prospect of this barren emptiness stretching out in front of me, of being permanently alone, that caused the most internal devastation. I felt something break inside me and begin to crumble.
There had been men before Sean. In spite of what had happened to me in the army, there had even been the occasional one since. The time we’d actually been together had been fleeting, little more than an instant. But nobody understood or accepted what I was, what I might be, the way Sean had.