“Nine tomorrow evening.”
“I can do that.”
“Good then.”
“Wait,” Art said. It was their call on place and time, but he did have one condition. He gave it to Pritchard not as a request.
“I guess we’ll have to manage that.”
“I guess you will.”
“Tomorrow, Agent Jefferson,” Pritchard said, then hung up.
Art put the phone back in its cradle and adjusted the baseball cap on his head, looking to the car and the small figure in the passenger seat. A little more than a day and Simon would be gone. He’d hardly known the kid at all.
Pritchard did not get up from the chair after hanging up. He sat as Sanders watched him, waiting for some words of direction, but after an awkwardly long time the younger man cleared his throat.
“You’ve been like this ever since you met Jefferson.”
“How’s ‘this’?”
“Contemplative,” Sanders explained. “Excessively.”
“Well, Mr. Sanders, you are one boldly observant young man.” And a correct one at that, Pritchard knew.
“What is it?”
“Something that Jefferson said.” Pritchard lifted a dead cigar from the pedestal ashtray next to his chair and slid it between his teeth. “This innocent is different. People will still want him. They’ll still look.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’ll have to arrange for special handling. It can’t happen as Jefferson thinks it will.”
Sanders face belied his ignorance of Pritchard’s point.
“Sanders, I want you to leak the information to the opposition,” Pritchard directed.
The whites of Sander’s eyes grew around the dark centers until they looked like plates of alabaster china with dollops of thick gravy in the middle of each. “But that means they’ll know. They can stop it. I don’t understand, sir. I don’t—”
Pritchard lifted a hand. “Having people looking for the innocent won’t do. There has to be an absolute resolution.”
Sanders understood somewhat now. Exposure. It would mean the end of what they were, what they represented. But what was Mr. Pritchard thinking? How would alerting the opposition prevent that?
How was the question that Pritchard, former army Ranger, drill instructor, jump master at Fort Bragg, had been agonizing over through two sleepless nights, and two endless days. How to achieve an absolute resolution.
The answer he came up with was spawned by an old adage concerning absolutes or certainties. Death and taxes, he recalled. One was of no use to him. The other was Simon Lynch’s only hope.
As long as Art Jefferson behaved as Pritchard believed he would. If he did not, the hope for one would become the fate of both.
“This is what I expect to happen,” Pritchard began.
Chapter Twenty Two
Bait
Bob Lomax tossed his jacket to the coat tree just inside his office as he arrived and sneered at his desk.
“Sir?” an agent said through the still-open door behind the SAC.
“Yeah?” Lomax inquired without turning.
“This arrived by courier,” the agent said, and when the SAC turned to cast a wary eye upon the bulky package he added, “I had it fluoroscoped.”
Lomax took the package in hand and judged by the shape and heft that it contained about half a ream of material. “From who?”
“The stamp is Fort Meade.”
A lightness lifted Lomax’s chin, and he turned for his desk, the agent closing the door as he left. Once seated, Lomax drew the sharp edge of his letter opener under the envelope’s flap and, trusting that the package being fluoroscoped meant there wasn’t anything to worry about, removed the contents, just about what he’d guessed in amount. He gave a cursory look inside the empty envelope for any stragglers, then turned his attention to the stack of pages. A thick rubber band held them together.
On top there was a letter, addressed to him, on plain paper.
Agent Lomax,
You will know once you read the enclosed material that a crime has been committed. I was party to it, but am by no means at its heart. This concerns an effort to discredit Agent Art Jefferson, through means too incredible to mention, or to document. What I can tell you about are those who conceived this, and in particular about a man named Rothchild. You would know him as Kirby Gant.
Gant? The name was familiar, but Lomax recalled after a moment that the Kirby Gant he knew of was dead, sleeping with the fishes somewhere if his memory was right. So how could this concern him?
Forty minutes later, after scanning less than half of what an early morning courier had brought him, Special Agent in Charge Bob Lomax was on the phone with the office of United States Attorney Angelo Breem, demanding a meeting within the hour.
The house in which Nelson Van Horn lived was empty, as it was each morning at this time, and so when the phone rang it was left to a staple of modern life to answer.
“Hi, this is Nels, I can’t come to the phone right now, so if you’ll leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can…”
BEEP.
“Hello, I’m relaying a message. Tonight, at nine, the Skydeck Observatory. Bring what you have.”
The line clicked off, the dial tone echoed in the house, then silence.
Twenty minutes later, Rothchild double clicked an icon on his computer screen and played an intercepted telephone call for Kudrow.
“Who was that?” Kudrow asked.
“Jefferson is getting edgy,” Rothchild theorized. “He’s afraid to even have his voice heard now. Tired, paranoid is my guess. Getting weak. So he gives someone a few bucks to read that into a phone somewhere.”
“Where did the call originate?”
“Near O’Hare,” Rothchild answered. “Tonight, nine o’clock. And how convenient — the Skydeck is closed for redecorating. Boo-hoo.”
“Van Horn will be there,” Kudrow commented.
“A cripple and a retard,” Rothchild observed. “Not much in the way of resistance added to Jefferson.”
“There’s liable to be shooting just like at the apartment,” Kudrow posited. “They’ll lock the place down tight. A hundred and three floors is a long way from an exit.”
“It’s one floor from one,” Rothchild said, pointing upward with a straight finger. “A helipad on the roof.”
That would mean acquiring transport, and putting people atop one of the tallest buildings in the world. “What about security?”
Rothchild leaned back, hands laced together behind his head. “At nine on the dot the elevators will suddenly stop working. Security is on the first floor at that hour. That’s a long walk up.”
“What about the cameras?”
“Glitches come in pairs,” Rothchild replied with smug certainty. He loved this, and it showed. Almost better than sex. “Plus, did you see the Chicago forecast for tonight? Fog a rollin’ in from the Lake. No one will see a thing. It’s up to the roof and away they go.”
The end. Finally. Kudrow had tasted it for days, bitter when close and then snatched away, sweet now in expectation. Resolution. This entire episode needed to be over.
“Arrange it,” Kudrow said, nodding to Rothchild as he left, though he might have spit upon the man if his powers of observation could reach into the very near future.
“They took the bait,” Sanders told Mr. Pritchard, almost surprised that he was doing so. “How did you know?”
“Desire, Sanders.” Pritchard clipped the end of a fresh cigar and took his time lighting it. “It makes desperate people predictable.” He puffed five times, long and slow, before taking the roll of heavenly, aromatic leaves from his lips. “Are we ready to intercede?”