The rest of the time he fished the crowds for Special Surprise Guests nobody had known were out and about. He had no vanity, and he was good at looking like something other than a federal cop. He was six feet three and lanky, with pale blue eyes, long blond hair and a mustache. He looked like the aging cowboy he probably would have been if he hadn’t been optimistic enough to join the marines twenty-five years ago and accidentally seen a few big cities. He usually went to a gate when a crowded flight from a major departure point was unloading. He would stand a little back from the gauntlet of moms and pops scrutinizing the file of passengers to see Junior a second earlier. He would carry an object—maybe a magazine, maybe only sunglasses or a set of car keys—but never a cup of coffee, because that was what people drank when they were on duty. And like the moms and pops, Jack Hamp would stare at each face for a moment right in the eyes, because he too was hoping to recognize someone.
He managed to pick out a few interesting faces each month, and this probably made his reports worth sending, but he didn’t much like the assignment. He suspected he had gotten it because the Department wanted him on the payroll, but didn’t have a clear idea what to do with him on a day-to-day basis. He was young to be a retired cop—forty-six—but he was too old and uneducated to be on the Upward Trail with the rest of the Boy Scouts.
The Justice Department had put him through a refresher course in investigative techniques of the sort he had given to ten or twelve litters of rookie cops over the years, an orientation for federal employees that he had used to compile a list of whose calls he could ignore, and a little practice in shooting holes in cardboard cutouts that looked like the villains in a comic book. Then they had sent him back to L.A.
Hamp walked with a barely perceptible limp as he got up and made his way to the pay telephone at the other end of the concourse. The man who had put the hole in his left thigh eight years ago had taken a little of the femur with it, and he sometimes felt the stainless-steel pin. He dialed the number quickly. “This is Hamp,” he said.
The man on the other end was somebody he had never talked to before, but Hamp knew Richardson’s name. It was one of the ones he couldn’t ignore.
Ackerman walked to the Hong Kong Airlines desk. The man behind the counter was Chinese, but he had an engraved name-plate on his jacket that read MR. SULLIVAN. His English accent made Ackerman homesick for Schaeffer’s life. “May I help you, sir?”
“You have a flight to Hong Kong in twenty minutes,” he said. “Do you have any seats left?”
Mr. Sullivan clicked some keys on his computer. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s fully booked. We have another at four-seventeen.”
Ackerman hesitated. Hong Kong was okay, because he could go back through British customs after a week without raising any eyebrows. If he flew back through New York, there would be watchers in the airport, and he might never make it out. He decided that waiting was the smaller risk. “I’ll take it.”
“May I have your passport, please?”
Ackerman plucked it from his coat pocket and handed it to Mr. Sullivan, who glanced at it and set it aside for a moment.
“How will you be paying for that, sir?”
“Cash.”
“Fine,” said Mr. Sullivan. “Let me just confirm that it’s still available.” He pressed three numbers on his telephone and began to speak in Chinese. Ackerman glanced around at the people lining up behind him and setting their luggage down. As he turned back, his eyes caught something peculiar. At the far end of the counter there was another man speaking into a telephone in Chinese. It was the cadence that caught his attention. When Mr. Sullivan talked, the other man stopped, and then Mr. Sullivan said something and the other man glanced in his direction. Ackerman watched the man until the two hung up almost simultaneously. He stood at the counter while Mr. Sullivan made out the ticket, copying his name from his passport, and then he walked away.
He knew it was possible that Mr. Sullivan was only calling his supervisor to check on that reservation. It might even be that two conversations followed approximately the same course, ended at the same time, and had nothing to do with each other. But it might also be that two men who worked for Hong Kong Airlines had just made a year’s salary. He had been away a long time. Ten years ago the Balacontano family could steal the cargoes off wide-body planes in the middle of JFK and truck them out. It wasn’t hard to believe that by now they could search passenger lists for the right alias.
He walked to Gate 28, where he was to board the flight for Hong Kong, then walked along the concourse until he found the right place to sit. It was two gates away, at Gate 26. The seat he wanted was occupied, but a lot of flights were going to leave before he needed it. He used the time to buy a ticket for the four-thirty plane to Albuquerque, and then sat in a coffee shop where he could watch people coming through the metal detectors that guarded the concourse, until he realized that watching was pointless. They didn’t have to send faces he knew; somehow they had found out what name he was using. And they wouldn’t be clumsy enough to get stopped by a metal detector. The gun would be concealed inside another steel object or, more likely, was already here.
He returned to Gate 26 and began his vigil with the idea that nothing would happen until they announced that his plane was boarding.
Jack Hamp took his old carry-on bag out of the car and walked back through the front door, up to the metal-detector station where Marlita Gibson gave him a sober nod as she looked through the fluoroscope at the outlines of his Colt .45 1911 automatic and the spare magazines in the pocket beside it. Hamp had a strong desire not to fire it. The 225-grain semiwadcutter hollowpoint ammunition was what he called the “airport load.” It not only mushroomed on impact but expanded. It wasn’t going through any walls if he missed. If he didn’t miss, the recipient was going to find out that Jesus wanted him for a sunbeam. He snatched the bag off the conveyor and walked on. As he strode along the concourse toward Gate 28, he opened the bag and searched for a ticket folder in his collection that said Hong Kong Airlines. When he found it, he stuck it in his coat pocket where it could be seen.
At the gate, he sat down in the smoking area a few yards away from the nearest passenger and lit a cigarette. If the man spotted him first and was any kind of shot, at least he wouldn’t miss Hamp and put a hole in some kid’s head. And this one might be pretty good. From what Richardson had said, he sounded like a genuine badass. As Hamp inhaled the first sweet, cool smoke from his cigarette, he thought about how much worse the last puff always tasted. He kept his eyes on the passing throng, moving from face to face, first studying, then rejecting. He acknowledged that if he was already thinking about how hot and nasty this cigarette was going to get, it probably was time to quit smoking. All the pleasure of it depended on your being able to keep things from yourself.
He was going on the long odds that this Mr. Ackerman was going to be armed. It was highly unlikely that anybody could get on a plane at Kennedy and still be able to reach into his pants at LAX and come up with anything in his hand that he wasn’t born with. But people who killed a lot for money got into the habit of brooding about such things in their spare time, and, more often than you would think, they found ways.
Hamp glanced at the airline desk in front of the gate and noted that Mr. Sullivan was in position. As soon as Mr. Ackerman showed his face, he was going to meet Jack Hamp.
Ackerman saw the tall, thin, melancholy blond man come into the waiting area at Gate 28 and sit down to light a cigarette, and he studied him with special care. He had a worn carry-on bag, and what looked like a Hong Kong Airlines ticket sticking out of his pocket. He was alone. He was doing pretty much what anybody would do in his position, which was to watch the people around him without letting them notice.