With Freeboot now linked to the Calamity Jane killings, the media furor had been explosive. After the FBI had tossed Monks away like a drained husk, satisfied that he had nothing more to give them, packs of journalists fell upon him. When he finally got to his home, bone weary and heartsick, a crowd of them was waiting.
He might have been able to endure even that, but he had come to realize that the media’s main interest in him didn’t lie in what had happened-it was in fashioning some tawdry story about a dysfunctional family with a renegade son.
He had shoved his way through them into his house, then walked back out with his shotgun, emptying the five-round magazine over their heads amid a shower of leaves and branches from the overhanging trees. After the last of their vehicles spun out of his drive, he had politely carried all of their dropped equipment down to the county road and left it there in a pile. The incident had brought him a warning phone call from the local sheriff’s office, along with several threatened lawsuits from the offended news folk. Other calls were still jamming his line-requests for newspaper and magazine interviews, invitations to appear on national television, feelers from talent agents and film producers for books and made-for-TV movies. But no one had dared come onto his property again.
There was one upside to it alclass="underline" this time the authorities had hidden Mandrake genuinely and well. The odds of Freeboot’s finding him now were practically nil.
Pietowski’s headlights appeared, coming up the driveway. He parked and got out of the car, a newish generic sedan that was probably from an agency pool. He was wearing a light jacket and slacks, looking more like a realtor on his way to a Kiwanis Club dinner than a man who made a living tracking killers.
“Nice place,” he said. “I see what you mean about liking your privacy. Ever think about putting in a security system?”
“I keep meaning to.”
“You’re not worried about Freeboot paying you a visit?”
“He’s not going to kill me, not any time soon,” Monks said. “He wants me alive, thinking about Glenn.”
Pietowski gave a curt nod. His meaty ears seemed to flop slightly.
“I hate to say it, but you’re probably right,” he said.
Inside the house, Pietowski glanced around with the bland expression that Monks had seen on other FBI agents, absorbing all the information that the room offered. He stepped through the junk on the floor and picked up the open bottle of Finlandia vodka, raising an eyebrow appreciatively.
“Good stuff,” he said. “How long you been going at it?”
“Couple days.”
“Mind if I have one?”
“Help yourself,” Monks said. He waved a hand toward the kitchen. “There’s clean glasses in there someplace. Ice. All that.”
Pietowski moved to the kitchen with his deliberate, almost lumbering walk, and started opening cubboards. His jacket parted as he reached for a glass, giving Monks a glimpse of the leather sling of his shoulder holster.
“So, you’re a Chicago boy,” Pietowski said. He chunked ice cubes into the glass and filled it with the Finlandia. “Me, too. Where’d you go to high school?”
“Saint Leo. Down on the South Side.”
“Sure, I know it. I’m from Saints Cyril and Methodius, myself, up north. Wall-to-wall Polacks.”
Monks got a piece of split oak from the woodbox and knelt in front of the stove. He stirred up the embers with the log, shoved it all the way in, and closed the iron door. He turned back, still on his haunches, then sat on the floor, hard, like a toddler.
Pietowski watched him, with a twist to his mouth that might have indicated sympathy.
“I know you took a hell of a beating,” he said. “You did what you had to. So did we. That’s how you’ve got to look at it.”
Monks exhaled, then nodded. Pietowski extended a hand. Monks took it, and used it to pull himself laboriously back to his feet.
“There’s just been another killing that looks like a Calamity Jane,” Pietowski said.
Monks nodded again. He was too numb to be shocked.
“Happened a couple hours ago, it’s just now crossing the wires,” Pietowski said. “ A Sutton Place penthouse, right in the poshest part of fucking Manhattan. Security like Fort Knox. They got up on the roof somehow and rappeled down an outside wall. But this time we got the shooters.”
A flare of grim excitement cut into Monks’s sluggishness. Finally, something to go on.
“Have you identified them?” he asked.
“We don’t have a clue, which is why I’m here. When they knew they were trapped, one of them dove out a window. Hit the pavement face first, from twelve stories. The second one was right behind him, but a police sniper creased his head and knocked him back inside.”
Pietowski took a six-by-nine-inch manila envelope from his jacket pocket and tossed it on the coffee table.
“This is the one that’s still got a face. I thought maybe you’d recognize him, from the camp.”
Monks remembered the maquis well, even the ones he’d only seen by firelight. He opened the envelope and pulled out several high-resolution black-and-white photos of a man’s face taken from slightly different angles. He was about thirty, clean-shaven, with short, neatly styled hair. It was the same businessman’s look sported by Freeboot’s other maquis, except for the bloody jellied mass of blood and brain where the sniper’s bullet had clipped the right parietal bone, above and behind the ear.
But Monks had to shake his head. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I never saw him,” he said, tossing the photos back on the table.
“That’s too bad.”
“Sorry I can’t help.”
“I don’t mean you. I mean, that tells us that the ones you saw aren’t the only ones. There’s more of them out there than we thought.”
While Monks ingested this unsettling information, Pietowski started pacing with slow, heavy steps that were like the systematic plodding of a draft horse.
“I’m guessing they were under orders not to be taken alive, so they wouldn’t break down under questioning,” he said. “Maybe even to destroy their faces, to make them harder to identify. Their fingertips were scarred, too, like the ones you saw. Now, what the hell kind of people are willing to sacrifice themselves like that?” He seemed to be asking himself, rather than Monks. “Religious fanatics, suicide bombers, okay. Or somebody in a jealous rage that pulls a murder-suicide. But highly trained operatives do not commit extremely risky crimes, give away what they steal, and then off themselves when they’re cornered. That’s not how they think. Those guys are survivors.”
“Freeboot talked about the assassins,” Monks said. “Their absolute loyalty. The night of that scalp hunt, he told a story about how the Old Man of the Mountain could point at a man and snap his fingers and that man would jump off a cliff to his death.”
Pietowski grunted. “Telling a story’s one thing. Getting people to actually do it-” He shoved his hands into his pockets, then stopped walking and turned back to Monks.
“I’ve got something else to ask you. There’s a buzz, about Bodega Bay. You know the place?”
“I’ve driven through it a fair amount,” Monks said. Bodega Bay was a small, pretty town on the coast about twenty-five miles north of his home-an old fishing harbor that had adapted more and more to recreation, and recently to condos.
“That’s where they filmed that Hitchcock movie The Birds,” Pietowski said. “Remember that, mid-sixties?”
The Birds was the town’s claim to fame as a tourist attraction, although mention of it tended to make residents roll their eyes. Monks recalled, oddly, that early advertisements for it had read: THE BIRDS IS COMING.
“Sure,” he said. “What do you mean, a buzz?”