“We are.”
Pritchard replaced the cigar between his teeth and put his feet up on the coffee table. It was all up to Jefferson now.
After an interminable hour watching Angelo Breem peruse the documents at a leisurely pace, Bob Lomax stood from the couch where he’d sat in forced silence and brought a wide, flat hand down on the pages under the U.S. Attorney’s nose.
“Dammit, Breem, what is it going to be?”
Breem stared at the hand until Lomax removed it, then his eyes came up. They were no longer bright with self assurance. “This looks real.”
“For God’s sake, man, what else would it be? Who has any reason to make that all up?”
Breem wanted to say Jefferson did, but even if that were true there was no way that one FBI agent on the run could arrange this. Jefferson actually seemed inconsequential now. A different thought had caught his fancy, like a bright shiny dime gleaming in contrast with a stale old penny.
And he was not the only one to see the dime. Lomax had even polished it up just to hold it out to him. “You want a name, Breem? This is your ticket to that.”
It was more than a ticket to that, Breem could see. Some things were big. Some were mountainous. This was fucking Everest with stairs carved into its side and arrows pointing him to the top. He’d be a fool not to make the climb.
Screw Jefferson, he thought. Screw Fiorello. Let the minnows be.
Angelo Breem had himself a shark.
A few dabs of makeup had toned down the bright coloring of the wet scar on her cheek, but it would not go away completely. That was fine. Let it be a reminder.
Keiko loaded two weapons into her purse, identical Mini-Uzis like the one she’d tried to waste Jefferson with in the apartment. And two pistols. And plenty of ammunition for them all.
But from her back pocket she removed her instrument of choice, the straight razor, and opened it to see the light glint off the blade as she twisted it in the air.
“Close enough, Joe,” Keiko said to the razor. “Maybe shoot you in the legs to slow you down, then…” Wheesh. Wheesh. Wheesh. She sliced the blade through the air and clicked it shut in one snappy motion, then slid it back into the back pocket of her jeans. She reached up and touched the welt on her cheek. It was warm. Like blood.
Chapter Twenty Three
Hunt and Peck
A two year old Dodge pickup was Rothchild’s car of choice, though it wasn’t registered to him, or to anyone that actually existed for that matter. It was registered to a name. A silly name. How far one could get on a string of letters, he often thought.
In the afternoon, as the workday ended, and with the weekend just one more day away, Rothchild left his subterranean lair with a satisfaction that buoyed his step and actually made him smile at the main lobby receptionist and found his clean black pickup waiting in the close lot where he always parked it. He climbed in, started the throaty engine, and backed into the traffic aisle without looking. If he hit something, so what? Today was a day not for worries. It was a day to mark in his mental record books. His biggest challenge completed. His biggest scheme brought to a successful end.
There was a bottle of champagne he’d saved for something like this, he remembered as he moved past the guard posts, through the serpentine drive, and onto the roads of Fort Meade. Yes, a bottle of bubbly, as the ever so cosmopolitan characters in the movies used to call it. Bubbly and a babe. He had the former. The latter he could rent.
Leaving Meade proper, he thought of what kind of babe he’d like this night. One of the top heavy ones for some raucous titty fucking, or an A cup waif who he could maneuver around the bed like some female Gumby doll.
Choices, choices. Maybe both. Yeah. Both. He could handle that, and he could certainly arrange it.
Driving with one hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, Rothchild lost himself in a daydream of the possibilities, thinking of little else, and never noticing the four cars that took turns tailing him both back and front.
It was an old Royal that he’d dug out of a storage closet, something so archaic that he was surprised it was even allowed in the Chocolate Box. But it was, the glorious old machine that Brad Folger placed on the blotter on his desk after locking his door.
He drew a breath in, held it, and rolled a sheet of paper into the machine, exhaling as he pecked at the sticky keys with one finger of each hand. Yes, it was old, it was slow, it was an implement of inefficiency. But there was one thing it had over its modern counterparts: a total lack of wires.
Brad Folger wanted this last bit of information to be available to no one, until the time came. When he finished he put it in an envelope with instructions, and wrote Pedanski’s name on the outside.
It was not a suicide note. At least not his.
The amazing thing about being where one wasn’t supposed to be was that most people didn’t give a damn who was where as long as no one was making a fuss. Art knew that from years of having to pull information from witnesses like teeth, things that one would think the person must have seen, but, oh well, they didn’t think it too strange the man had a rifle in one hand as he walked down the street.
Getting on the service elevator in the maintenance garage had been exceedingly easy. It was after five, leaving just a few workers milling around, and all the effort it took was putting two hardhats on his and Simon’s heads and waiting until a few backs were turned to the corridor leading to the elevators.
Art never had any illusions about trying for the lobby elevators. They would be crowded with people. People who watched the news and might notice a big black guy and a scrawny white kid together, even if they didn’t match the photos, his from his Bureau file, Simon’s ripped from a frame in his dead parents’ home.
But a couple of hardhats, however odd, would be par for the course in a building where some renovation was being done. Although Simon’s less than macho posture, head dipped, could have drawn a curious eye, it did not. Luck? Timing? Art didn’t care. Once on the elevator, an express to the top twenty floors, he pressed 103 and let out a breath as the doors slid shut.
Trooper Wayne Dupar of the Indiana State Police lit up his rack as he pulled in behind the late model Taurus with three occupants, male it appeared from his vantage, following the vehicle as it glided to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate.
He gave his position to his dispatch center, knowing that if another unit was in the area they would have it do a roll-by as a matter of practice, and left his cruiser to approach the car from the driver’s side, hand on the top of his pistol.
“Gentlemen.” Dupar said. “Good evening.”
Georgie already had the window down, and his wallet out. “Officer. Was I speeding?” Just give me the ticket. Fast.
Dupar leaned low and looked across the front seat. Ralph looked back at him, smiling casually. In the back seat a stern man sat on the far right, a bag on the seat next to him. Dupar recognized it as a pilot’s bag. So, planning on doing some flying, are we—
“No, sir, you weren’t speeding, but we had a report of a vehicle matching this one driving recklessly about fifteen miles back that way on the interstate.”
“Reckless?” Georgie repeated with a sprinkling of shock. “I promise you, officer, that wasn’t me.”
“Well,” Dupar drawled, “I’m going to have to satisfy myself about that. I’m going to have to ask you some questions and give you a field sobriety test.” He looked to the other two men. “I’m going to have to give you field sobriety test also, gentlemen.”