That left an encouragingly short list. There wasn’t time to count the names, but there were still too many. She thought about what he had done. He had walked into a kitchen, shot Tony T in front of a lot of people and walked out. It was the middle of the night. Of course he had known Tony T was dangerous. What he would have wanted to do was to sneak into Talarese’s bedroom while he was asleep and empty the pistol into his head. It would have been between three and five in the morning, the time the police always picked for a raid, when he would be deep asleep, and the plane reservation would be based on what he had wanted to do, not what he’d had to do. He would expect to be finished and on the street by five-thirty at the latest, at the airport again by six-thirty and on a plane by seven-thirty or eight. That was the absolute outside limit.
Elizabeth pushed aside half of the flights. Would he sit around in an airport until 10:55 waiting for a way out, when anybody could walk in and see him? Not a chance. He would be long gone by then. He’d be up in the air about thirty thousand feet on his way to … where? Not someplace where there would be two flights a day, eight hours apart. If he missed the first one, there had to be another one warming its engines on the runway. Someplace big and busy. She went through the pile of flights again, pulling out the small cities, losing hundreds of names as she did it, and feeling warmer now, closer to him. Once, years ago, she had gone through the airline lists, knowing that he was one of the names, and never gotten this close. He had already landed somewhere before she even knew he had taken a plane. But this time was different; these flights were still in the air. Maybe this time.
He was running, and he wasn’t going to cross his own path. No return reservation. She obliterated all the round-trip tickets, now finding reasons for eliminating names faster than her hand could move to strike them out. Almost all the remaining names had booked return flights.
Form of payment. He would certainly have credit cards, probably in a lot of different names. But if he did, he wasn’t going to let them be used to trace him away from the crime scene, and he wasn’t going to throw one away for an airline ticket. He would use them for hotels after he had come to earth someplace safe. He would pay cash for the ticket.
There were only five names remaining on three flight lists now, and she laid them all out on the table and stared at them. One of them looked wrong: Hagedorn, David. She was sure she had crossed that one off already. She looked quickly from sheet to sheet. Hagedorn, Mary, traveling with Hagedorn, Marissa. Parents. At one time she wouldn’t have understood, but now she did. It was that awful, depressing anxiety that one of the planes was going to fall out of the sky, and some sort of magic would keep Marissa from being an orphan. She crossed off Hagedorn, David.
There was nothing to distinguish any of the other four. They had all bought tickets with cash on the day of the flight. All had chosen to leave New York on morning flights. All were males traveling alone, taking any seat they could get. Somebody undoubtedly had heard a relative was sick, another had been called for a job interview, another had a girlfriend who wanted him to join her after all. The fourth had just fired a pistol into the head of a New York caporegima, and was understandably impatient to get out.
Richardson came in behind her, but she didn’t look up. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve got it down to four,” she said.
“How the hell did you do that? What are the criteria?”
“It would take an hour to show you. We don’t have an hour.”
“Give me the four.”
She handed him the three passenger lists with four names left untouched. “I don’t know how to get it down to one.”
He glanced at the lists. “Dallas … Chicago … Los Angeles … another Chicago. What do you want to do?”
“If there’s any way in the world to hold all four of them, do it,” Elizabeth said. “He’s running. Though he doesn’t exactly run; he just sort of fades out. He won’t stay put. He’ll get on another flight under another name. He’ll pay cash.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s no time. Look at those ETAs.”
“I’ll get the FBI on the phone.”
* * *
Elizabeth watched Richardson through the open door of his office. It was the third time he had been on the telephone with the FBI agent. He held his ballpoint pen over a yellow legal pad, at first poised to write something down, then just gripping it like a knife, clicking the button on the end of it nervously, retracting and extending the tip over and over as he listened.
She waited at her old desk and tried to avoid the bad luck by watching the first group of ambitious GS-7’s and −9’s coming in to work early, each expecting to be the first, seeing her and looking puzzled, then seeing Richardson’s door open and looking disappointed. She had been like them once, and it mortified her now, but at the time it hadn’t been ambition. She just hadn’t known enough history. They had still called it the Organized Crime Task Force in those days, behaving as though they had been brought together to cope with an emergency that would go away if they worked harder than the Mafia. That was before she had learned enough to realize that criminal conspiracy was the natural state of affairs in all civilized countries. People who worked for the Justice Department had to be in it for the long haul.
But then Richardson was on his feet and out of his office, and the expression on his face was enough. “No hits,” he said. “Dallas is seventy-one years old, and both Chicagos are military personnel. L.A. is already on the ground and the FBI doesn’t even have its team there yet. I’m sorry.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s not too late. He’s got to be in the L.A. airport, or near it, trying to get out. He doesn’t have another reservation. Don’t we even have a birdwatcher in a major airport like that?”
“We don’t have a picture or a description or anything else. Nobody’s ever seen him. What are they supposed to do?”
“He’ll be getting on another flight. Try the name. It might not be any good now; next time he can call himself Rufus T. Firefly if he feels like it. But there’s got to be a way to stop him before he gets on another plane. It will be a one-way ticket bought for cash in the airport since his plane landed.”
“I don’t know,” said Richardson. “This is getting thinner and thinner.”
“Please,” said Elizabeth. “This is closer than we ever got ten years ago.”
Jack Hamp was sitting in the coffee shop overlooking Runway 23 with four engine mechanics from United when the crew chief happened to notice that the light on his beeper was blinking. It didn’t blink often, so he didn’t look at it often. He wasn’t under the illusion that if there was an emergency they would think to warn him, so a month after he had gotten this assignment he had opened it up and cut the wire from the relay to the little speaker.
Jack Hamp had managed to retire from the Los Angeles Police Department after twenty years and gotten a job as what he had thought was a Justice Department field investigator. At the moment the job didn’t involve much investigating. He was supposed to loiter in the L.A. airport and watch the huge amorphous, anonymous crush of people getting on and off airplanes to see if he could spot any of the fifty or so men and women that the Justice Department was giving special attention to at any given moment. Most of the time, when somebody like that was coming through, Hamp would have the reservation in advance, and all he would have to do was to pass by the gate to see him step aboard, then report what he had seen: “Subject Vincent Toscanzio. At 13:53 subject boarded TWA flight 921 for Chicago, ETA 7:53 P.M. Was accompanied by two male Caucasians listed as Harold Carver, positive I.D. Joseph Vortici, and Paul Smith, probable I.D. Frederick Moltare.” It all went into the hopper for some analyst to sort out in Washington.