He was smiling still. Quinn caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the chest of drawers. McCrea heard the footfall and turned. The bullet took him in the stomach, an inch above the navel. It went on through and destroyed the spine. As he went down, he stopped smiling.
For two days Quinn nursed Sam like a child. The paralyzing fear she had experienced caused her to shiver and weep alternately, while Quinn held her in his arms and rocked her to and fro. Otherwise she slept, and that great healer had its benign effect.
When he felt he could leave her, Quinn drove to St. Johnsbury, phoning the FBI personnel officer to claim he was her father in Rockcastle. He told the unsuspecting officer she was visiting him and had caught a heavy cold. She would be back at her desk in three or four days.
At night, while she slept, he wrote the second and real manuscript of the events of the past seventy days. He could tell the tale from his own point of view, omitting nothing, not even the mistakes he had made. To this he could add the story from the Soviet side, as told him by the KGB general in London. The sheets Moss had read made no mention of this; he had not reached that point in the story when Sam had told him the DDO wanted a meeting.
He could add the story from the mercenaries’ point of view, as told by Zack just before he died, and finally he could incorporate the answers given him by Moss himself. He had it all-almost.
At the center of the web was Moss; behind him, the five paymasters. Feeding into Moss had been the informants: Orsini from inside the kidnappers’ hideout, McCrea from the Kensington apartment. But there was one more, he knew; someone who had to have known everything the authorities in Britain and America had known, someone who had monitored the progress of Nigel Cramer for Scotland Yard and Kevin Brown for the FBI, someone who knew the deliberations of the British COBRA committee and the White House group. It was the one question Moss had not answered.
He dragged the body of Moss back from the wilderness and laid him alongside McCrea in the unheated lean-to where the firewood was stored, where both bodies quickly became as rigid as the cords of pine among which they lay. He rifled the pockets of both men and surveyed the haul. Nothing was of value to him, save possibly the private phone book that came from Moss’s inside breast pocket.
Moss had been a secretive man, created by years of training and of surviving on the run. The small book contained more than 120 telephone numbers, but each was referred to only by initials or a single first name.
On the third morning Sam came out of the bedroom after ten hours of unbroken sleep and no nightmares.
She curled up on his lap and leaned her head against his shoulder.
“How you feeling?” he asked her.
“I’m fine now. Quinn, it’s okay. I’m all right. Where do we go now?”
“We have to go back to Washington,” he said. “The last chapter will be written there. I need your help.”
“Whatever,” she said.
That afternoon he let the fire go out in the stove, shut everything down, cleaned and locked the cabin. He left Moss’s rifle and the Colt.45 that McCrea had brandished. But he took the notebook.
On the way down the mountain he hitched the abandoned Dodge Ram behind the Jeep Renegade and towed it into St. Johnsbury. Here the local garage was happy to get it started again and he left them the Jeep with its Canadian plates to sell as best they could.
They drove the Ram to Montpelier airport, turned it in, and flew to Boston and then to Washington National. Sam had her own car parked there.
“I can’t stay with you,” he told her. “Your place is still tapped.”
They found a modest rooming house a mile from her apartment in Alexandria where the landlady was glad to rent her upper front room to the tourist from Canada. Late that night Sam took Moss’s phone book with her, let herself back into her own place and, for the benefit of the phone tap, called the Bureau to say she would be at her desk in the morning.
They met again at a diner on the second evening. Sam had brought along the phone book and began to go through it with him. She had highlighted the numbers in fluorescent pen, colored according to the country, state, or city of the phone numbers listed in it.
“This guy really got around,” she said. “The numbers highlighted in yellow are foreign.”
“Forget them,” said Quinn. “The man I want lives right here, or close. District of Columbia, Virginia, or Maryland. He has to be close to Washington itself.”
“Right. The red highlights mean territorial United States, but outside this area. In the District and the two states there are forty-one numbers. I checked them all. By the ink analysis, most go back years, probably to when he was with the Company. They include banks, lobbyists, several CIA staffers at their private homes, a brokerage firm. I had to call in a big favor with a guy I know in the lab to get this stuff.”
“What did your technician say about the dates of the entries?”
“All over seven years old.”
“Before Moss was busted. No, this has to be a more recent entry.”
“I said ‘most,’ ” she reminded him. “There are four that were written in the past twelve months. A travel agency, two airline ticket offices, and a cab-call number.”
“Damn.”
“There’s one other number, entered about three to six months ago. Problem is, it doesn’t exist.”
“Disconnected? Out of service?”
“No, I mean it never did exist. The area code is two-oh-two for Washington, but the remaining seven figures don’t form a telephone number and never did.”
Quinn took the number home with him and worked on it for two days and nights. If it was coded, there could be enough variations to give a computer headaches, let alone the human brain. It would depend how secretive Moss had wanted to be, how safe he thought his contacts book would stay. He began to run through the easier codes, writing the new numbers yielded by the process in a column for Sam to check out later.
He started with the obvious, the children’s code; just reversing the order of the numbers from front to back. Then he transposed the first and last figures, the second-first and second-last, and third-from-first and third-from-last, leaving the middle number of the seven in place. He ran through ten variations of transposition. Then he moved into additions and subtractions.
He deducted one from every figure, then two, and so forth. Then one from the first figure, two from the second, three from the third, down the line to the seventh. Then repeated the process by adding numbers. After the first night he sat back and looked at his columns. Moss, he realized, could have added or subtracted his own birth date, or even his mother’s birth date, his car registration number or his inseam measurement. When he had a list of 107 of the most obvious possibilities, he gave his list to Sam. She called him back in the late afternoon of the next day, sounding tired. The Bureau’s phone bill must have gone up a smidgen.
“Okay, forty-one of the numbers still don’t exist. The remaining sixty-six include laundromats, a senior citizens’ center, a massage parlor, four restaurants, a hamburger joint, two hookers, and a military air base. Add to that fifty private citizens who seem to have nothing to do with anything. But there is one that might be paydirt. Number forty-four on your list.”
He glanced at his own copy. Forty-four. He had reached it by reversing the order of the phone number, then subtracting 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, in that order.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a private unlisted number carrying a classified tag,” she said. “I had to call in a few favors to get it identified. It belongs to a large town house in Georgetown. Guess who it belongs to?”