She did as she'd been told. He pulled off the silk belt she had looped around her pajama shorts and tied her hands together. He then looped the free end several times around the bed's foot and secured it there to keep her from crawling to where she might cut herself free.
"Thanks," he then said, and left her lying on her face. Back in New York, Joe Gunther got the phone call he'd been waiting for all night.
"Joe, it's Ward. We're taking a Customs chopper up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Liptak's got a place near there-someplace named Castle Island."
"I know it. Very fancy neighborhood. What makes you think he's there?"
"I'm not sure we do, but your boy Willy does. His car was spotted abandoned near the house. You want to come along? This being your people, Phil Panatello has no problem with it."
"Of course I do," Gunther answered. "You have local liaison up there?"
Ogden hesitated. "Not yet. I don't think so."
"Contact Janet Scott of the Portsmouth PD. She'll do what needs to be done. One of the good guys."
"Got it. Here are the directions for getting to the chopper."
Chapter 25
The Portsmouth naval prison is one of the region's oddest landmarks. Located on the eastern edge of the large island housing the Navy Yard, the now-empty prison dominates most inland vistas like a cross between an ancient fortress and a gigantic, Stalinist apartment block. It is at once stately and hideous, alluring and repellent. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and nicknamed the Castle, it was designed as the Navy's premier highsecurity facility and made to the then-popular template of Leavenworth and comparable hellholes, complete with stacked and terraced jail cells, electrically controlled sliding doors, and shooting galleries for the guards-a James Cagney movie hauntingly frozen in concrete and steel.
Unaware his car had been identified and was now under surveillance, Willy drove to Seavey's Island, showed his badge to the guard at the gate, and was waved through without further effort. Once a beehive of Eisenhower's "military/industrial complex," the Navy Yard was thinly manned now, enough that periodically it had to justify its existence before congressional subcommittees-an unheard-of humiliation in the old days. As a result, while parts of the island were still closely guarded, a good chunk of it was virtually open to the public, an aspect some initial investors had hoped to bank on by transforming the prison into a business condo with some of the best views in town. Until their funding crumbled with only a few rooms gutted and refitted with new windows.
Willy had no idea what Andy Liptak's plans were when he bought the lease from those disappointed visionaries, but he suspected money-laundering probably played a role.
The day had fully arrived by the time he parked nearby. There was a modern bachelor-officer's housing unit within twenty yards of the prison's west wall, so the presence of vehicles went without notice, and it was already late enough that the owners of those cars were at work elsewhere on the island.
Willy took his bearings. The building lay along a roughly north-south axis. It had a central portion resembling a castle keep-ergo the nickname-complete with four looming, crenellated corner turrets, and two asymmetrical wings, both shorter and narrower and equipped with smaller, evenly spaced turrets of their own. The whole was utterly massive, if neglected and weatherbeaten, and seemed well endowed with windows, until closer scrutiny revealed that all of them had been tightly boarded up, lending to the place the look of a medieval Playmobil toy hormonally run amok.
Architectural integrity, however, had been altered long before the windows had been sealed. The "new" section, also called the Fortress, had been tacked onto the tail end of the southern wing to handle World War Two's excess population. Its axis was east-west, it was as tall and massive as the central Castle, but while it tipped a hat to the Castle's architecture with a single turret and some arched windows, the turret was square and the windows were graceless, and the overall aspect was so bland, white, and blockish, it ended up looking like a Montgomery Ward warehouse in need of repair.
But it was also where Willy saw his best hope for gaining entry. The Fortress had been where the developers had done their truncated remodeling and in the process had both breached the exterior walls and punched holes in some of the rusty chain-link fencing designed to keep out trespassers.
Willy cautiously crossed to the foot of the Fortress's walls and cut around to the south wall to get a feel for his surroundings. Before entering this abandoned behemoth, he wanted to know how the ground lay around it.
In fact, it was remarkably desolate. Despite its location in the middle of a major city's harbor and on the edge of a military base, the prison had a distinctly lonely feeling to it. Virtually surrounded by water on three sides and at the farthest distance possible from the island's busiest spot, the building seemed shunted aside, as if not just history but geography had decided its usefulness was firmly in the past.
This isolation became an advantage on the other side, however, and helped explain the eagerness with which those long-vanished developers had eyed the property. The harbor; the city of Portsmouth; the string of bridges spanning the Piscataqua River; Kittery, Maine; and Castle Island, all stretched before it like a peaceful, unblemished maritime panorama. And as if in poignant and ironic contrast to the building he was about to enter, Willy was startled to see the ancient, tumbledown Wentworth-by-the-Sea Hotel just across the water, once host to moneyed visitors from Boston and elsewhere, standing in stark contrast to the far harsher quarters behind him. What feelings those jailed sailors must have had a half century ago, watching the rich and famous being liveried to and from this monumental watering hole, and listening to the laughter and music that once must have emanated from its open windows on a summer night.
Now, both abandoned, empty, and falling apart, they stood as mute witnesses to bygone times, as anachronistic and retrospectively romantic as the contrast between Sing Sing and Jay Gatsby.
Willy, however, saw all this only in passing. What caught his eye and heightened his anticipation was the black BMW parked out of the way, under a tree, as discreetly as possible. Running the risk of being seen, he trotted over to the car and glanced inside, finding what he thought he might-a smear of blood across the backseat-but which still didn't look as bad as he'd been fearing. From that scant evidence alone, he took heart that Sammie was still alive.
He returned to the most likely breach in the prison's exterior wall and slipped inside. Joe Gunther pointed to the tall, blond, athletically built woman in uniform who was standing by the edge of the helicopter landing pad.
"That's Janet Scott," he told Phil Panatello, shouting over the sound of the rotors.
They waited until the crew chief gave them the thumbs-up before jumping out of the aircraft, instinctively ducking as they jogged over to where Scott was waiting.
She gave Gunther a smile as he drew near. "Hey, Joe. Long time. You're traveling in style. I didn't know you were a part of this."
"More of an outrigger than a real part," he admitted, and made introductions all around.
She directed them away from the prop wash into a small concrete building that doubled as a waiting room.
"This is what we've got so far: Your Willy Kunkle apparently broke into the Liptak house-smashed the door down-smacked her around a little and forced her to tell him that Liptak might be holding out in the old naval prison on Seavey's Island." She cast a glance at Gunther. "He really one of yours?"
"As is the one who's missing."
"Granted." She held her hand up as Panatello opened his mouth to say something. "Anyway, that was her story, and it's true that we found her hog-tied on the bedroom floor. But we also found a twelve-gauge hole in the bedroom door where she tried to kill Kunkle as he entered, except that he came in through a different door."