It was offline. I looked it over. The battery had been removed, and someone had used a blunt instrument on the thing. It was as dead as Benedict Arnold. The old battery wasn’t there. Installing a new one, assuming I had one in my pocket, wouldn’t make it work.
Someone had come up here while the Internet was off and fixed this thing good. That meant they had recognized the cameras on the outside of the building and in the hallways for what they were.
I reached under my sport coat and fingered my popgun while I looked around the roof. Whoever had done the dirty deed wasn’t there now. I walked around the edge of the building’s roof, looking. There didn’t seem to be any access to the roof except through the door by which I had entered. The nearest other building was at least fifty feet away across a driveway and lawn borders. Fifty feet is a lot of space to cross.
Oh, man! I felt naked. I could be in a sniper’s crosshairs right now. Right goddamn now!
I slid down behind an air vent and sat looking around, trying to think.
I wondered when the Company guys in the van left. Not that it mattered.
The fact that Reinicke had been killed when his apartment exploded crossed my criminal mind.
I couldn’t stay here. I was up and running at full tilt in a heartbeat. Got to the door and shot through it. Went down the stairs and along to the elevator and took it down to Grafton’s floor, the seventh.
Went down the hall and let myself in.
Went to the kitchen and found Callie. “Forget the salad. We need to leave now.”
“Now?” She looked at me without understanding.
“Get your coat and purse and let’s get out of here. Now.”
Callie Grafton was quality. She was certainly Mrs. Jake Grafton! She didn’t even stop to put the salad makings in the refrigerator. She merely walked to the closet by the front door, pulled out her coat and purse. I held the coat for her, and then we walked out. I made sure the door locked behind us.
We left the building and walked across the street to the pizza joint. I explained while we walked. “It looks as if someone visited the building while you were gone and the Internet and cell phone net were down. They’re still down. The crash of Air Force One. Everyone and their brother and sister and spouse and girlfriend are trying to get on them. Whoever was in the building sabotaged the repeater I put on the roof and may have entered your condo.”
We went inside and installed ourselves at the bar so I could see anyone crossing the street to the Graftons’ building. “Let’s wait here for the admiral,” I said. The television on the wall was still covering the crash of Air Force One.
She took several deep breaths as I surveyed the crowd. About ten people, all drinking, watching the news on television.
I turned back to Callie. “No doubt I’m being paranoid, Mrs. Grafton, but the DNI, Reinicke, was killed when a gas leak in his apartment exploded. Someone may be trying to kill the admiral the same way. Probably not. But there is a chance. Say one in a hundred. Why risk it?”
“You really think—”
“I’m paranoid, sure. But the admiral sent me over here to check. And I’ve checked, and I think the thing to do is wait for him and you two spend the night somewhere else. Tomorrow, when things calm down, we’ll have some experts go through your place.”
The barman came down the counter. “A drink? A menu?”
Mrs. Grafton said, “I’ll have a glass of chardonnay. And a salad with vinegar and oil. Tommy?”
“Bourbon. Neat. And a salad like the lady’s.”
We had had finished our salads and each had a couple of drinks when I saw Jake Grafton’s old Honda pass by. I intercepted him on the street after he came out of the garage.
He came in, got a quick update from Callie and glanced at me with those gray eyes.
“Thanks, Tommy,” he said.
Zhang Ping and Choy Lee watched the coverage of the crash of Air Force One on a television in Choy’s apartment. He had a big flat-screen television made in China that he had bought at Walmart.
Zhang’s English was improving — he listened very carefully and watched a lot of television — but he had a long way to go, so Choy translated whenever the announcer was saying something that he thought Zhang might like to know.
Outside the wind was howling down Chesapeake Bay. Forty knots, at least, Zhang thought. When he got home tonight he would open his window a crack and turn on the heater, so he could hear the wind sing and not get chilled.
Zhang liked his apartment, which was three times bigger than the flat in which his parents had raised him. It was the nicest place he had ever lived. If his mother were still alive, she would have been overjoyed to see it.
His kitchen, with its appliances and big refrigerator, was a constant source of delight. So was his bathroom, with the heater and white ceramic toilet that flushed and swept everything along to some mysterious fate, out of sight and mind. He knew the sewage didn’t go into the bay — this was America! Not China, with its dozen hundred million poor people. That was the world Zhang had escaped when he joined the PLAN. And here he was, watching American television, listening to the wind howl outside, with his comfortable, pleasant apartment to return to in a few minutes.
Zhang wondered what the Americans were thinking about the assassination attempt. Were they angry, amused, frightened? They didn’t like their president very much, Zhang believed. Only one in three people thought he was doing an adequate job. Apparently it was a sad case of voters’ remorse. That thought led Zhang to muse about public opinion polls, which were a strange thing in his experience. No sane person would ask thousands of people in China what they thought about the government, then publish the results.
Finally Zhang bid Choy good-bye, and was soon outside, feeling the wind tear at him as he walked the quarter mile to his building. The wind whipped his hair and tugged at his clothing. It reminded him of nights at sea, when he was a cadet and, later, aboard his first ship.
Unfortunately those days were behind him now, and would probably never come again. Still, in the interim, he could enjoy the wind.
He opened his window an inch or two and let the singing night wind into his apartment.
Savor the days, he thought. Savor being alive. The end will come too soon.
With Choy’s help, Zhang bought a pickup truck the next day. It was two years old and had no rust. Although he had a driver’s license, this was the first vehicle he had ever owned. Well, he really didn’t own this one, since it was purchased with Chinese government funds but he liked it anyway.
Choy made some telephone calls to get insurance for the truck, vanished into an office and came back with a sheet of fax paper. “We’re good to go,” he said.
Zhang drove it out of the sales lot with Choy in the right-hand seat.
“I only have an international driver’s license,” he told Choy. “Will that be a problem?”
“Not with your passport and tourist visa. And this insurance binder.” He folded it up and put it in what he called a “glove compartment,” a drawer with a door that hinged downward, below the dashboard on the passenger side.
As he drove along with a wary eye on traffic and the road signs that told him speed limits and others that had names of places and arrows, Zhang tried to stay in the proper lane for turns. One had to decide far in advance of a turn which lane was best and pick a hole in traffic to get into it. American drivers, he had noticed, were very touchy about someone cutting in front of them and quick to blow their horn and glare. Or raise a middle finger. Driving required concentration.
Finally he took Choy home and dropped him off, then went motoring by himself.