Pandemonium broke out in the breakfast room. Todd raced the rest of the way down the corridor without a word, confident that Carol was right behind him as backup.
Turning the corner he stepped over Reisberg’s body, his eyes automatically scanning the small room, right to left.
Paul Innes, his tie loose, was shouting into a telephone. Todd shot him in the side of the head, the telephone flying out of his hand as he crashed sideways into the long glass buffet table. A glass door leading out to the rose garden crashed open and Todd switched his aim left, firing one shot that went wide and to the right, just as Robert Highnote disappeared across the narrow veranda.
“Get him,” Todd whispered, and Carol stepped behind him, and rushed across the room.
Melvin Quarmby had snatched up the sterling silver coffee server and he threw it at Todd in a final desperate act. Todd easily sidestepped it, and fired one shot, this one catching the NSA counsel in the throat, destroying his windpipe and severing a carotid artery. The man fell backward as he clawed at the fatal wound.
There was an unsilenced shot outside. Todd reached the glass doorin time to see Carol sitting down hard in the snow, clutching her left shoulder with her right hand.
Highnote was racing across the rose garden with surprising speed and agility for a man of his age. Todd crouched in the classic shooter’s stance, followed Highnote’s retreating figure and squeezed off a single shot, the bullet catching Highnote high in the back, his body falling forward and lying still.
Carol was just getting to her feet when Todd reached her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded, grim-lipped. “Are we finished here?”
“Yes,” Todd nodded. “It’s time to go.”
Chapter 20
Stephanie had wanted to leave the hotel immediately, but McAllister convinced her that they would run less of a risk of being spotted if they waited a couple of hours until normal workday traffic began. They wouldn’t stand out as the only ones on the street. They checked out a few minutes after seven-thirty, paying their bill and walking three blocks down to New York Avenue directly across from the sprawling Washington Convention Center.
The dawn was gray and overcast. Traffic was extremely heavy and still ran with headlights. The gaily lit Christmas decorations seemed somehow out of place, especially considering Stephanie’s dark mood. She had convinced herself that something terrible had happened to her father, and McAllister had no real idea what he could or should say to her, because he thought there was a better than fair possibility she was correct.
They found a cab almost immediately, the driver a young black man with Walkman headphones half over his ears, beating a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Can you take us to the BaltimoreWashington Airport?” McAllister asked when he and Stephanie got in the backseat.
The driver looked at their images in his rearview mirror. “Man, in this shit?” he asked, indicating the thick traffic.
“A hundred dollars,” McAllister said. “We’ve got a plane to catch, and we can’t afford to screw around.”
The driver grinned, hitting the button on his trip meter as he pulled out into traffic. He reached down with his right hand and turned up the volume on his Walkman, his head bobbing with the music that was suddenly so loud McAllister and Stephanie could hear it in the backseat.
McAllister looked over his shoulder a couple of blocks later to seeif they had picked up a tail. He decided after a few moments of watching traffic, that they had not, and he sat back. They’d done the impossible, so far, he thought. But from this moment on it was going to start getting difficult. Stephanie was holding his hand, her palms cold and wet, her entire body shivering. She looked into his eyes. “If something has happened to him, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said, her voice cracking. “Someone from the Agency and probably the FBI was sent up to interview him,” McAllister said. “But I don’t think they’d do anything more than ask a few questions.”
“He wouldn’t have told them anything.”
“Of course not.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about, David. It’s the Russians, or the Mafia.”
“There is no reason for them to go to him,” McAllister said, not really believing it himself. “It’s me they’re after.”
“And me, because I’m helping you.”
“But they’re not after my wife. There’s no reason to suspect they’d go after your father.”
“God, I wish I could believe you,” Stephanie whispered, sitting back. “I wish it was that easy.”
He let it rest for the moment. Trust your instincts, she had told him.
I think that something did happen to you in the Lubyanka. Something that changed you, something that made you unsure of your own abilities. But deep in your gut you know what moves to make, you know how to protect yourself… Let yourselfgo, David. Let your old habits, your old instincts take over…. You have the tradecraft, use it.
“He doesn’t know anything,” she said softly. “I didn’t tell him what we were doing, just that we were together.” He squeezed her hand. “It may be that we won’t be able to get to him.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes wild. “You’re on the run. Dexter Kingman might figure that you’d try to contact your father. They could be watching the place, waiting for you to show up.”
“Then why didn’t they put a tap on his phone?” she asked. “There was no answer last night and again this morning.”
“Because they knew that even if you did call him, you wouldn’t reveal your location.”
She suddenly saw what he was driving at. “They could have shunted his incoming calls to a dead number, making me believe that something had happened to my father. Bait. It could be a trap.”
McAllister nodded, thinking that in a way it would be much easier on her if that were the case, and yet doubting it. They reached the parkway just past the National Arboretum, and the driver sped up across the Anacostia River, merging smoothly with the traffic that had thinned out. Most people were coming into the city at this hour, not leaving it.
They were in Maryland now, and a couple of minutes later as they passed over lLandover Road, three highway patrol cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, raced beneath the parkway heading northwest toward Hyattsville and College Park.
Stephanie stiffened, but when the police cars did not take the entrance ramp onto the parkway, but instead continued northwest, she relaxed slightly.
McAllister watched out the rear window as the squad cars were lost in the distance, then he cranked down his window a couple of inches. At first he could hear nothing but the roar of the wind. The driver, feeling the sudden cold air, looked up. Then in the far distance, McAllister thought he could hear sirens. A lot of sirens.
An accident, he wondered. Or was it?
It was nearly nine by the time the cabbie dropped them off at the Eastern Airlines passenger departures entrance of the BaltimoreWashington International Airport in Ferndale just south of downtown Baltimore. After McAllister paid the driver, he and Stephanie hurried into the terminal, took the escalator downstairs to the baggage pickup area, and stowed their two overnight bags in a coin-operated locker.
Their driver had taken the down ramp around and was waiting in front for a fare back to Washington. It had begun to snow lightly again. Christmas music was playing on the overhead speakers. It wasfaintly depressing. A young couple climbed into the cab a few minutes later, and when it was gone, McAllister and Stephanie went outside and got a cab into Baltimore, Stephanie giving the driver an address a couple of blocks from her father’s house. Once again McAllister got the odd feeling that he was coming back on his life. That he was retracing old steps. That he was making no progress. Stephanie sat on the edge of the seat, her hands together in her lap, holding herself rigidly erect as if she were afraid she would break something if she moved.