“What?” Ralph protested, leaning toward the window.
“It happens that sometimes a passenger was driving, then someone switches off,” Dupar explained in a painfully slow, meticulous cadence. “Like I said, I’m going to have to satisfy myself that you all are all right to be operating a motor vehicle.”
Son of a bitch. Ralph looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. They had to be at the airfield in twenty minutes. “Officer, can we hurry this up, maybe? We’ve got someplace to be.”
Dupar scratched his square chin, once, twice, three times. “Sir, hurrying causes accidents. I’d hate to see you all hurt in an accident. I’d hate to see that.” Not… “I want you to drive away from here alive and in good shape tonight. All right.”
Fine. Fucking fine. Just do it. Do it. Ralph nodded and sat back in his seat.
Officer Dupar showed rows of bone-white teeth to the driver and asked, pronouncing every syllable as if talking to a foreigner, “Okay, sir. How about we get you done first?”
“What do you think?” the supervising FBI agent asked, showing the hours-old photo to two of his subordinates on the hastily arranged operation. “I think it looks like him.”
The other agents looked to the photo of the man driving the black Dodge pickup, then to an older mug shot of a man named Kirby Gant, a.k.a. Mr. Tag.
“If it ain’t him,” one of the agents commented, “it’s a twin.”
The supervising agent tapped the photos together on the edge of the fold-down desk in the back of the surveillance van and picked up the phone, dialing the number he’d been give.
“Yes?” a voice answered after just one ring.
“Mr. Breem…”
The lobby elevators were good enough for Keiko when she arrived a few minutes after eight, darkness having settled upon the city, and a quietness to the massive building that she found exciting. There was nothing like the shrill edge of a scream ripping an unsuspecting silence to shreds.
She imagined a cry resonating from Jefferson as the elevator began to move. Closed her eyes and made it real in her head.
Her stomach pressing low from the upward rise, the sound playing as if real, she felt a warmth trickle up her thighs and plant itself between her legs. Alone in the elevator, she pressed them together, surprised that thoughts of one so old could excite her.
Maybe pain was pain, and pleasure just pleasure, regardless of age. She would soon know. If so, it would mean a far broader horizon.
Chapter Twenty Four
Dead No More
There was nothing to which Art could compare this sight. Nothing. As he and Simon walked past sawhorses and the idle tools of carpenters’ labors, and approached the east side windows of the Skydeck Observatory, all the world below seemed to be a sea of undulating white mist that rolled inward from Lake Michigan, lit with a radiance borne of a thousand man-made lights below. And from this sea the Sears Tower rose, a rectangular island of black against a star flecked indigo sky, the moon barely a scythe above.
Simon released his grip on Art’s hand and pressed himself right up to the glass wall, his breaths laying steamy ovals on the surface. His head came up, eyes also, the jitter somehow steadied, and he looked out upon the world high above the world below.
“This is up…” he said, and moved along the floor to ceiling window, hands walking along the glass like a mime searching for an exit from the transparent box that imprisons him. “Up…”
“We’re way up,” Art said in agreement, losing himself in the moment, in Simon’s discovery of another place, maybe another universe altogether as he saw it. However he saw it.
Simon’s head twisted as though he were pressing an ear to the glass, eyes to the ceiling, trying to get the best view possible. “We’re in the sky.”
Art followed along as Simon neared the corner of the stripped room. “What do you see?”
“Simon sees up.”
And what did that mean? Art wondered. Did Simon even know? In the end, did it matter?
“Up,” Simon said once again.
Art put a hand on his back and tipped his wrist to check the time. It was almost nine.
This was the night it would end, and Rothchild was gone. Kudrow had made the trip from the Chocolate Box to Rothchild’s office to monitor developments. But the man who did not exist had gone home for the day, treating it as any other. That might have been appropriate in most cases, but not this one. He should have realized that, Kudrow thought. Damn right he should have.
So back to the Chocolate Box Kudrow went, through checkpoints he had just come in the opposite direction, back to his office and to a small phone book he kept in the safe with the master cipher books for KIWI. In the back of that phone book, on a page with more scribbles than readable text, Kudrow ran his finger to the third phone number from the bottom. It had a line through it like most of the others.
He dialed it standing behind his desk.
“Hello?”
An unseen hand might have reached out and lifted Kudrow’s chin, but it was his own reaction to the strange male voice at the other end of the line.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Kudrow’s throat constricted involuntarily, lest an errant demand be loosed on the person who had answered Rothchild’s phone.
No one answered Rothchild’s phone but Rothchild. That was the agreement. That was the rule.
“Who the hell is there?”
His breathing might have traveled over the line, and Kudrow thought maybe the thump of his heart as it slammed against the inside of his chest at a pace he could not remember, even during the most grueling treadmill tests he’d been subjected to.
This was a muscle out of control, fed by adrenalin and whatever other chemicals his brain was telling the glands to let loose into his system. This was panic.
“Is anybody there?”
Kudrow laid the phone back into its cradle, keeping his hand on it as if to hold it in place, standing as still as he could, feeling the bethump bethump bethump bethump in his chest go on until he thought it might let loose, like an engine that had thrown a rod, ripping a hole right there and letting the blood spurt out against his blazing white shirt.
He wondered if he was having a heart attack, and then he wondered if he should be wishing that it were so.
The supervising FBI agent spun a chair around and sat facing Kirby Gant in his kitchen.
“Can I have something to drink,” Rothchild asked almost meekly, as he remembered doing long ago.
“You got anything?” the agent asked.
“Fruit punch, in the fridge,” Rothchild said, and one of the dozen FBI types in his apartment poured him a glass. He sipped from it, draining half, then set it on the kitchen table. “Thanks.”
The supervising agent nodded. “Now, how is this going to go? Easy or hard?”
Rothchild had already been read his rights. He knew that he could have an attorney present during questioning. And he further knew that no attorney in the land could do for him what he could do for himself.
“Your name is Kirby Gant,” the supervising agent said when no reply came to his question. “Correct?”
Oh, old Kirby. Kirby was dead. Kirby could do Rothchild no good at all. Zero.
“You don’t want to talk to Kirby,” he told the agent. “You want Rothchild.”
Because Rothchild was the one with value, and Rothchild understood the game. Kirby had showed him how to play.