Three minutes. Five.
John looked at his watch: 2:12 a.m.
Seven minutes, then eight. A storm that never ends, he thought. He reached down to press the fast forward when the image shifted from the dripping Valencias to a long shot of a building. He took his finger off the button and felt a surge of blood hit his eardrums. The Journal.
The camera held on the lobby as a woman wrapped in a raincoat makes her way through the doors. She wears a hat cinched down over her blond hair. She hesitates at the edge of the entryway overhang and looks skyward.
Rebecca, John thought. Rebecca the beautiful. Rebecca the unmistakable. Rebecca.
The rain has lessened to a constant drizzle and she jogs out into the asphalt. She chooses a path through the cars, then, holding the hat onto her head with her left hand she accelerates toward the camera. She looks far away. But the camera follows her through the cars, then it swings ahead and zooms in on a new Lincoln Town Car-white. It almost fills the screen. It is parked beside a brick planter that separates the parking slots from the driveway. The camera jiggles slightly, then stops, as if-John thought-the operator has just tightened a tripod nut. A few seconds later Rebecca enters the picture again, stops at the driver's side door of the Town Car, extends her hand toward the door lock and inserts a key. Her back is to the camera. The picture jumps slightly. Rebecca's arms raised as her body pushes against the car. It looks as if someone has yanked her forward with a hidden wire. Then she rolls away to her left and takes two small, feminine, dance-like steps toward the camera, which jumps again and Rebecca folds to the ground. The camera holds the image for five seconds. There is a red blotch on the Town Car window, chest high. There is no sound. Then the picture fades to black and the black abruptly gives way to gray static.
John simply stood in place, unmoving, and stared at the silent gray screen. He felt the revulsion gathering in his stomach and a frantic anger knotting up in his heart. He imagined setting fire to the cottage, loading his dogs into his truck, driving over to the Big House and lighting it on fire too, shooting Holt in the head when he ran out, then speeding away forever. For a moment he felt like he had entered Hell and was unsure if he would ever get back out. How do you forget what is seen, erase a memory of the real?
Drawn to the horror, feeling that he owed at least this much to Rebecca, he watched the tape again. Every moment of it removed something measurable from his soul.
John loped along in the moonlight with his dogs ahead of him, Re-bec-ca-pause, Re-bec-ca-pause, along the lakeshore where he had first seen Vann and Carolyn Holt many years ago, around the western edge of the water and into the scrub hills of Liberty Ridge. He looked down on the island. He imagined being eleven again and hiding there with Carlos in the cave with the spring bubbling up from the rocks and wondered why he had spent a lifetime trying to outrun the snapping jaws of loss.
What he had just seen seemed to him the ultimate profanity; Rebecca's once vibrant body reduced to a lump of lifeless flesh in the rain. But the tape in his pocket was a prize beyond anything Joshua could have dreamed.
He made the clearing, sat on the log and felt his heart thumping in his temples. The dogs sprawled around him. He looked at the place where Snakey had died. The breeze rattled the stiff leaves of the oak tree. What had they done with his body? It all seemed such a waste.
I am here to atone and begin again, he thought.
I am here to put things right.
I am here, like Holt, to do justice.
And I won't leave without his head on a platter.
John had never heard Joshua Weinstein so excited. Not that the special agent was giddy, no. But his voiced dropped a register when he asked John again about the video tape, the message on the computer, the interdiction mission in Little Saigon, and most of all, when he asked John to tell him again exactly what the tape showed.
John told him. He told him again. The images slugged away at him until he couldn't describe them anymore.
"Fuckin' enough, Joshua!" John listened to the hush on the other end of the line. "Give me something back, goddamnit. What about the notes on Baum? Are they real or not?"
"Affirmative. Documents confirmed it against samples from Wayfarer's Bureau days. It's his writing."
"And the picture of Baum's house?"
"Unretouched. Unaltered. Genuine. His fingerprints on both of them."
"Then he isn't testing me. So who's setting him up for us? Who knows what I'm doing here?"
"The Messingers might be next in line to run Liberty Ops if Holt is up the river. They might have intuited your true mission and decided to give him a push."
"Might doesn't get me very goddamned far, Joshua."
"It's a privately held company. We don't know what the bylaws are, if there even are any. It's Holt's show. We can only speculate."
"What about Fargo?"
"He's loyal as a dog."
"So was Cassius. And he's the one who checked me out. He was close, Joshua. He traced us to Olie's together, but couldn't get the proof. He knows you don't hunt quail with a German shepherd. He knows I'm not good with a handgun because we shot together out there. He smells Rebecca all over me. Snakey, too. What if he found more than he's telling Holt?"
"If he did, then he'd blow you wide open. Why betray his master? It doesn't make sense. What's in it for Fargo? Do you think he really likes you?"
"He hates me."
"Then he's not going to feed you evidence to hang his own boss! Jesus, John. Try this: he's not being set up by a traitor, but by a conscience. Someone who knows what he did and hopes you can do something with the evidence. Someone who suspects not that you're a plant, but a man with a strong sense of right and wrong. Someone who knows everyone else is loyal to Holt. Someone who's loyal to Holt too, but not quite enough to let him get away with murdering an innocent young woman."
"Who?"
"His wife. His wife's nurse. His daughter. Thurmond or Laura Messinger. One of the Holt Men who works closely with him. Holt himself. Maybe he's broken down, needs to confess."
John tried to think through the possibilities, but they all sounded wrong. "Joshua, you don't have a clue about what's going on out here. Do you?"
"John, I don't give a damn what's going on out there. We've got five days. We're being fed evidence and I'm going to take it. If it comes from an unexpected source, fine. I'll use any bit of rope I need. When Holt's in lockup we'll sort through the program and identify the players. But as long as it's going like this, then in the name of God in heaven let's burn his sorry carcass while we can!"
John listened to Weinstein's clear baritone. He imagined his Adam's apple doing its little jig; he imagined Joshua's black eyes and pale skin and the unshakable focus of his vengeance. And John realized for the first time that he was utterly expendable here, only a tool for Joshua. He was a conduit, a piece of pipe. And no amount of danger or threat would make Joshua waver in his crusade to ruin Vann Holt. What an odd feeling, he thought, to realize you are only valued for what you can do. I don't care what's going on out there. What a simpleton he had been.
He said nothing for a long moment. Instead he felt the chill of the wind cutting through his coat, all the way to his bones, and the loneliness of his body here on Liberty Ridge. He felt the solitary nakedness that was his. He felt the border between his own skin and the world outside it, and knew that he could only trust what was within. He shivered and felt cold.
"The tape's in the box, Joshua."
"Very good, Owl. We can hope it's good enough for a warrant, but that's up for a judge to decide. Now, has he asked you to meet with Baum?"