“I know that.” A smile spread across Jake Grafton’s face. “The ol’ Horny Toad. He’s a good kid.”
Henry Charon stood leaning against an abandoned grocery store in northeast Washington and watched the black teenagers in the middle of the street hawk crack to the drivers of the vehicles streaming by. Some of the drivers stopped and made purchases, some didn’t. The drivers were white and black, men and women, mostly young or middle-aged. Knots of young black men stood on the corners scrutinizing traffic, inspecting the pedestrians, and keeping a wary eye on Charon.
The wind whipped trash down the street and made the cold cut through Charon’s clothes. Yet he was dressed more heavily than most of the crack dealers, who stayed in continual motion to keep warm. Somewhere a boom box was blasting hard rock.
He had been there no more than five minutes when a tall, skinny youngster detached himself from the group on the corner across the street and skipped through the cars toward him.
“Hey, man.”
“Hey,” said Henry Charon.
“Hey, man, you gonna buy this sidewalk?”
“Just watching.”
“Want some product?”
Charon shook his head. Four of the teenagers on the corner were staring at him. One of them sat down by a garbage can and reached behind it, his eyes glued to Charon and his interrogator. Charon would have bet a thousand dollars against a nickel that there was a loaded weapon behind that garbage can.
“A fucking tourist!” the skinny kid said with disgust. “Take a hike, honkey. You don’t wanta get caught under the wheels of commerce.”
“I’m curious. How do you know I’m not a cop?”
“You no cop, man. You ain’t got the look. You some little booger tourist from nowhere-ville. Now I’m tired of your jive, honkey. You got ten seconds to start hiking back to honkey-town or you’ll have to carry your balls home in your hand. You dig?”
“I dig.” Henry Charon turned and started walking.
The intersection two blocks south was covered with steel plates and timbers. Under the street, construction was continuing on a new subway tunnel.
Using his flashlight, Charon looked for the entrance. He found it, closed with a sheet of plywood. He had it off in seconds.
The interior resembled a wet, dark, dripping cavern. Henry Charon felt his way along, inspecting the overhead when he wasn’t looking for a place to put his feet. The tunnel continued ahead and behind him as far as he could see.
He began walking south, stepping over construction material and dodging the occasional low-hanging electrical wire. He inspected the sides of the tunnel and the overhead, looking for the ventilator shafts he knew would have to be there. He found three.
It was warmer here than it had been on the street. There was no wind, though a match revealed the air was flowing gently back in the direction from which he had come. Actually quite pleasant. Charon unbuttoned his coat and continued walking.
In several places the workmen had rigged forms to pour the concrete floor. The precast concrete shells were already in place on the arched top and sides of the tunnel, probably installed as the tunnel was dug.
After what he judged to be four hundred yards or so of travel, he came to a giant enlarged cavern. His flashlight beam looked puny as it examined the pillars and construction debris. When finished, this would no doubt be a subway station. Another tunnel came in on a lower level. Charon descended a ladder and walked away in the new direction.
This was his third exploratory trip to Washington in the past four weeks and the second time he had been in these tunnels. If the construction crews were making progress, it was not readily visible to Charon’s untutored eye.
Tassone had visited him a month ago at the ranch in New Mexico, and he had had a list. Six names. Six men in Washington he had wanted killed. Was it feasible? Would Charon be interested? Charon had looked at the list.
“George Bush?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re asking me to kill the President of the United States?”
“No. I’m asking you if it can be done. If you say yes, I’ll ask you if you’re interested. If you say yes, I’ll ask you how much. If all those questions are decided to the satisfaction of everyone involved, then we will decide whether or not to proceed, and when.”
“These other names — all of them?”
“As many as possible. Obviously, the more you get, the more we’ll pay.”
Charon had studied the names on the list, then watched as Tassone burned it and crumbled the ashes and dribbled them out onto the wind.
“I’ll think about it.”
So after three trips to Washington, what did he think?
It was feasible to kill the President, of course. The President was an elected officeholder and had to appear in public from time to time. The best personal security system in the world could not protect a working politician from a determined, committed assassin. All the security apparatus could do was minimize the possibility that an amateur might succeed and increase the level of difficulty for a professional.
The real problem would come afterward. Charon had no illusions on that score. Successful or not, the assassin would be the object of the most intensive manhunt in American history. Every hand would be against him. Anyone found to have knowingly aided the assassin would be ruthlessly destroyed — financially and professionally and in every other way. In addition, accused conspirators would face the death penalty if the government could get a conviction, and God knows, the prosecutors would pull out all the stops. Before the hit the assassin would be on his own. Afterward he would be a pariah.
For the assassin to walk away from the scene of the crime would not be too difficult, with some careful planning, but as the full investigative resources of the federal government were engaged, the net would become more and more difficult to evade. The longer the killer remained at large, the greater the efforts of the hunters.
Yes, it would be a hunt, a hunt for a rabid wolf.
As Henry Charon saw it, therein lay the challenge. He had spent his life stalking game in the wild mountain places and, these last few years, in the wild city places. Occasionally a deer or elk or cougar had successfully eluded him and those moments made the kills sweeter. After assassinating the President, he would be the quarry. If he could do the unexpected, stay one jump ahead of those who hunted him, the chase would be — ah, the chase would be sublime, his grandest adventure.
And if he lost and his hunters won, so be it. Nothing lives forever. For the mountain lion and the bull elk and Henry Charon, living was the challenge. Death will come for the quick and the bold, the slow and the careful, the wise and the foolish, each and every one.
Death is easy. Except for a moment or two of pain, death has no terrors for those who are willing to face life. Henry Charon’s acceptance of the biologically inevitable was not an intellectual exercise for a philosophy class, but subconscious, ingrained. He had killed too often to fear it.
Now he reached that place in the tunnel he had found on his last visit. It was in a long, gentle curve, halfway up the wall. As he had been walking along he had momentarily felt a puff of cooler air. Investigation had revealed a narrow, oblong gap just wide enough for a wiry man to wriggle through. On the other side was an ancient basement, the dark home of rats and insects.
After checking the area with his flashlight, Henry Charon squirmed through the gaping crack, which was lined with stones at odd angles. He was now in a room with a dirt floor and walls of old brick. The ceiling was a concrete slab. Above that, Charon had concluded after an afternoon of discreet pacing, was dirt and an asphalt basketball court.
This basement was at least a century old. The house which had stood above it had apparently been demolished thirty or forty years ago during a spasm of enthusiasm for urban renewal. The ceiling slab had not been poured here: the edges were not mated to the brick walls in any way. No doubt the demolition contractor had thought it cheaper to just cover the hole rather than pay to haul in dirt to fill it.