He would make things go a bit differently. He would appear to be in two places simultaneously. He picked up a couple of smooth Chinese river stones from the garden, climbed back through the window in the son's room, closed it, and took his magnet, then went to the baby's room. He placed the magnet, leaned out into the courtyard, and threw his first rock at the French doors, and the other right away at the opening in the courtyard, bouncing the stone so it sounded like someone running away.
The French doors swung open and the man with the shotgun ran along the courtyard to the arched portal, trying to get a shot at the intruder. Schaeffer stationed himself just inside the doorway of the baby's room and listened for sounds from the hallway. In a moment, the door of the master suite swung open and the two men who had been asleep ran up the hallway, trying to get around to the front of the house to head off the imaginary man their companion was chasing.
Schaeffer waited for the first man to pass his doorway, then stepped into the hall, already swinging his crowbar. His swing caught the second man just above his brow and knocked him backward onto the floor, unconscious. Schaeffer ducked back into the cover of the baby's room and used his crowbar to drag the man's pistol along the floor into his waiting hand.
The fallen man's companion was already near the end of the hall, but he had heard the sound of the crowbar blow and his companion's collapse to the floor. He fired twice, pointlessly, at the baby's room doorway.
Inside the baby's room, Schaeffer slipped out the window into the courtyard, aimed the gun in through the open window at the doorway, and removed his magnet from the sill. The alarm began to ring.
The man in the hallway, thinking Schaeffer had opened the window to escape, ran into the room, hoping to catch him in midclimb. Schaeffer fired twice into the surprised man's chest and watched him fall. Schaeffer climbed back in, closed the baby's room window, and hurried down the hallway to the master suite. He waited just inside the French doors that led to the courtyard.
The man with the shotgun had seen no intruder, but had heard the four shots and the alarm, so he ran back through the courtyard toward the master suite. As he burst into the suite with his shotgun ready, Schaeffer put his first shot into the man's right temple. He died before he could take a second step, and sprawled forward onto the floor.
Schaeffer pulled the pistol from inside the coat of the man he had just killed and the loaded spare magazine with it. Then he left through the French doors, closing them behind him. The sound of the alarm was muffled immediately, almost silenced by the closed-up and well-insulated brick house. But he wanted to be gone in case he had missed something and some unnoticed backup to the system had transmitted the message that there had been a break-in. He found an open trash can two blocks away and dropped his crowbar into it, with the magnet stuck to it.
He made it to the hotel, got into his car, and drove. He was tired, but he drove from Long Island to New Jersey, and checked into a hotel near Trenton. The night had been a disappointment. Five days had passed since the attack in Britain, and Frank Tosca was still alive.
7
On Monday morning at six A.M. Elizabeth walked into her office at the Justice Department. She wanted to spend the two hours before anyone else arrived getting caught up on the mail Geoff had left for her. The two hours before the phones started ringing would give her a chance to learn what she had missed and to find out what had been done about it so far. Deputy Assistant Hunsecker was acting as though disagreeing with him were a moral failing, and he'd given her the only administrative punishment she'd ever had. She wanted and needed to keep her job.
She had decided over the weekend that she would pretend to herself that it wasn't a great injustice that she was on the verge of being fired from her job after twenty years with the department. She'd worked in the bureaucracy long enough to know that allowing herself to nurse a grievance would eventually make staying at this job impossible. The only appropriate thing to do now was to pay attention to her work and do the best job she could.
She unloaded her briefcase on the desk and stopped. Her in-box had already been piled with files and memos when she'd left on Wednesday. Now it was empty. The other box was empty too, which was where she put papers that needed to be filed. Had Geoff filed everything? She recalled one of the files that had been in the box on Wednesday. It was a file she had made ten years ago about the expenses involved in centralizing the information obtained on organized crime wiretaps. Since another set of centralizations was coming, she wanted to refresh her memory of what was involved and how much it had cost the last time. She went to the correct filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and found the red card she had placed between two other files when she had taken that one so she could replace it easily.
She remembered a couple of other files and checked for them. None of them had been returned to the cabinets. They were simply gone. As she continued her search, she tried to delay the slowly growing conviction that this was Hunsecker's work. She looked around in Geoffrey's space for signs of whatever must have come in for her since Wednesday afternoon. There were no reports, no memos, no inquiries, not even a phone message. She went back to her office to see if anything had been stored in the locked file drawer in the left side of her desk.
At seven, Geoff came in. He was carrying the briefcase that he seemed to bring primarily to hold his snacks and newspapers. "Good morning, Elizabeth. Get through the exile okay?"
"It wasn't as bad as I'd feared or as good as I'd hoped. Have a good weekend?"
"Sure." He finished putting away his things, then said, "What's wrong?"
"I can't seem to find anything. I expected quite a pile of mail and stuff. Where is it?"
He came into her office and looked at her desk. "I had all of it right here and in order on Friday afternoon." He pointed at an empty space. "Right here."
"You didn't leave anything in the pile that was classified or sensitive, did you?"
"No," he said. "Everything like that is locked up in the reading-room safe."
She shrugged. "Then it probably isn't important. But I'll let you know when I find out what became of it." She went into her office and closed the door. It had occurred to her that having someone remove the files for her current cases was exactly what would probably happen if she were fired. Maybe Hunsecker had used her two-day suspension to get the AG's office to approve the firing. Maybe that was what the suspension had been for.
One of the buttons on her telephone lit up, then began to blink as Geoffrey put the caller on hold. She picked up the phone and hit the button. "Waring."
"This is Dale Hunsecker. I'm waiting."
She steeled herself for what she had to say. "If what you're waiting for is an apology, I know I owe you one. What happened last week was a misunderstanding that I allowed to happen. I wasn't ignoring your orders when I requested that surveillance on Frank Tosca. Conditions had changed, and I had new information that made it an emergency. I should have called you to explain before I did anything. I'm sorry."
"Well," he said. "I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised. I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"
"About what? Don't tell me Tosca has been killed."
"No. As soon as the surveillance was lifted, Tosca took his family and slipped away. Right now we don't know where he is. He left three men in his house, apparently to guard it. They were murdered on Thursday night. Their bodies were found in various parts of the house."
"How were they killed?"
"Let's see." He seemed to be perusing something. "Two shot, one bludgeoned to death."
"Do you know where the one who was bludgeoned was found?"