Ross saw a quick grin flick across Cutter’s lips. “So it’s like that. The longer it takes us to catch you, the more damage you’ll do.”
“You’ve got the picture.”
“We’ll have you on toast, Miles.”
“Come off it. Don’t go making any funeral arrangements until you’re sure you’ve got my corpse.”
“None of us wants that.”
“Myerson would like nothing better.”
“Hell, Miles, we’ve already arranged to sell your body to science. But you can still call it off.”
“No point in that. You people need me like the axe needs the turkey. If I stopped writing now it wouldn’t change that.”
“You really want this fox hunt, don’t you.”
“It’s a way to pass the time.”
“Want to know what I think, Miles?”
“Avidly.”
“I think you’ve picked this game because it’s impossible. You’ll have plenty of excuses for your failure. It’s a hell of a cheap shot.”
“You’re talking into a dead phone, Joe. I’ll see you sometime.”
Click.
Ross leaned back. “Of all the-”
“Shut up.” Cutter was jiggling the phone cradle; then he put the instrument back to his mouth. “This is extension seven six two. A call just came in on this line. I want the log on it.”
Ross stood up and went back to his chair. The ashtray beside it was crowded with butts. They’d been waiting three days and every time he’d made a suggestion about taking some action or other Cutter had told him to go ahead if it would make him feel better. Cutter just sat by the phone and waited. It made Ross feel like an ass. He knew how Cutter regarded him: for Cutter people seemed to have glass heads. To Cutter he was a tall excitable kid, an overgrown precocious schoolboy. And the power of Cutter’s personality was such that he’d half convinced Ross he was right in his judgment. Ross was a six-year veteran of the Agency and Cutter was making him feel like a green recruit.
Cutter grunted into the phone and hung it up. He swiveled on the corner of the desk and said, “The son of a bitch.”
“What?”
“It was a local call,” Cutter said. “The son of a bitch is right here in Langley.”
“He must have the balls of a brass gorilla,” Ross said.
“There never was anybody like him.”
“No way to trace that call, is there. Well it’s not such a big town. Shouldn’t we scout around and see if we can spot him?”
“He’ll be halfway to the West Virginia line by now.”
“Then what the hell do you have in mind? Sit on our asses and diddle ourselves until he calls back?”
“He won’t call back,” Cutter said. “He’s said everything he had to say.”
“He didn’t say much of anything.”
“He’s waving a red flag, that’s all. All right, it’s time we got started.”
“Doing what?”
“Collect the composites from the second floor. Get us a conference room for eleven-thirty. And organize some transportation.” Cutter had the phone again. “It’s Cutter,” he said into it, and covered the mouthpiece to talk to Ross again: “I’ll be with Myerson. You chair the conference. You’ll have twelve men. Take them into town and blanket the pay phones. Take the composites. Find out where he made the call from, what he was wearing, what kind of car he’s driving, which way he went when he left.”
“You think we’ll find anybody who noticed?”
“Probably not. But we’ve got to cover it.”
Ross started gathering things together and putting them into his briefcase. Cutter had gone back to the phone:
“Kendig’s here somewhere. In Langley. I’ll want a few more men on it… Nuts, he’s priority enough. He’s mailed a second chapter out to those publishers. He’s going to keep mailing chapters out until we get him. How long do you want it to take?… No. He says he wants revenge because he got canned but that’s not it. He’s like a bicycle, when it stops moving it falls down. He’s rolling again, that’s all. There’s no point to it beyond the movement itself. As long as he keeps rolling he stays upright, you follow?… Hell I’m not wasting your time. You asked me. Now he’s got to be traveling on phony papers. I’m going to need authority to call on some of the overseas stringers. We’ll have to canvas the dealers. He must have bought papers from somebody, probably before he left Europe…”
Cutter was still arguing with Myerson on the phone when Ross went out into the corridor.
— 6 -
He didn’t use the superhighways. There wasn’t any terrible rush and it was remotely possible they’d play the odds and cover the toll roads like the New Jersey Turnpike. The volume and concentration of traffic on those arteries was such that they might feel justified in using up manpower on stakeouts there. So he drove the old forgotten highways around the western suburbs of Philadelphia, up through New Hope and Lumberville, up the truck across the Delaware through Stockton and Flemington and Somerville, route U.S. 22 to Newark Airport. There as James Butler he turned in the rental car to the car agency. Then he took an airport bus into the West Side terminal in Manhattan.
A hunt built its own momentum. Later on they’d be close behind him with their noses to the ground and there wouldn’t be time to sit down and write. The thing to do was to write the whole thing and carry it along with him and post the chapters one at a time; he’d let Cutter’s actions dictate the intervals between mailings.
But it meant he had to go to ground for a period of weeks. The book didn’t have to be very long but certain things had to be covered in detail; he didn’t want to leave them room to squirm out of anything. It had taken him five days to rough out the chapter and another four days to polish it until it satisfied him; the second chapter had taken a bit longer than that. Probably the whole book would run about two hundred pages of typescript, of which he’d already written thirty-five; if he could do forty a week he’d have it finished in four more weeks. That meant hard steady work but it could be done; he wasn’t trying for any literary prizes.
The limit would be self-imposed because they weren’t going to go away no matter how long he took; but if he wasted too much time on it there was a danger he’d relapse and maybe not finish writing it at all. He had to keep the tension on. So he set himself a thirty-day limit. It would be just about the right length of time to get Cutter into hot water too.
But before he went to ground he’d have to lay a false trail-something to keep them occupied and leave them looking silly.
Number 748 Third Avenue was a steel-and-glass office tower that had been architected in evident imitation of a sheet of graph paper: as functional as a bayonet and just as warm. He consulted the building directory in the lobby and found IVES, JOHN H., LITERARY AGENCY -3302. He found the proper bank of elevators and touched his thumb to the depressed plastic square; it lit up in response to the heat of his skin and he twisted his thumb slightly, out of habit.
Muzak and two delivery boys accompanied him to the thirty-third floor and he found his way to Ives’s door. A chic receptionist asked him to wait; he sat while the girl talked into an interphone. The desk and shelves were cluttered with an awful mess and the floor was a jumble of opened cartons of books.
A man came through the door. “Mr. Butler? I’m Jack Ives. Come into the office.”
Ives was younger than he’d expected-very tall, glasses, beard, wavy brown hair cut and shaped by someone expensive. He didn’t exactly look distinguished; he looked like a character-actor who specialized in playing distinguished roles, but he was too young for the part and his eyes were too bright and crafty.
The office was as littered as the anteroom. It had the studied elegant decor of a nineteenth-century gentleman’s library but the frantic disorder dispelled that. Ives shut a door behind Kendig and waved him to a chair. “I don’t ordinarily talk speculative books with unknown writers. But I’ve checked with Desrosiers and he tells me I’d better listen to you. Your name’s not Butler, is it.”