There was no way out of this room except through the subway tunnel. That was the bad news. The good news was that the subway tunnel was the only entrance. A man would be reasonably safe here for a short while if he could get in without being observed.
Air entered this subterranean vault from several cracks in the brick walls and around the large stones that choked the opening through which coal had once probably been dumped into the basement. Charon suspected that nearby were other basements, other century-old ruins of nineteenth-century Washington, and the dark air passages were used by rats to go back and forth.
He checked the supplies he had brought here on two evenings last week, on his last trip to Washington. Canned food, a sterno stove, a first-aid kit, two gallons of water, three blankets, and two flashlights with extra D-cell batteries. It was all here, apparently undisturbed. He examined one of the blankets more carefully with his flashlight. A rat had apparently decided it would make a good nest. He shook out the blanket and refolded it.
He picked up a handful of dirt from the floor and sifted it through his fingers. It was dry, the consistency of dust. That was good. This would not be a safe place to be if water in any quantity ever came in.
Charon turned off the flashlight and sat in the darkness near the exit hole, listening. The sounds of traffic on the street twenty to thirty feet over his head were always there. Faint but audible. There was another sound too, of such low frequency as almost to be felt rather than heard. He eased his head out into the tunnel for a look, then crawled out. Now he heard it, a faint rumble. It seemed to be coming down the tunnel.
Standing in the subway tunnel he reinspected the hole with the flash. He wanted to leave no obvious evidence that anyone had been in there. Satisfied, he walked south as the rumbling noise faded again to silence. Not total silence, of course. He could still hear the street sounds from the world above.
If Tassone just wanted George Bush assassinated, that would be a large enough challenge to satisfy anyone, Henry Charon mused as he walked along. Make the hit, ride out the manhunt that would immediately follow, then leave Washington several weeks later for the ranch. Sit at the ranch for several years enduring the agony of waiting for the FBI to come driving up the road, and hoping they never came.
But Bush was merely the first name on the list. The other five, they would have to be killed after the presidential hit. That was the rub. The sequence was dictated by logic. If he first shot the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the attorney general, the Secret Service would surround Bush with a security curtain that one man could not hope to penetrate. So Bush had to be the first target.
That sequence inevitably created an escape problem of extraordinary complexity. He had to move in spite of the dragnet and find his targets. And escape without revealing his identity. Again and again.
Could it be done? Could he do it?
He glimpsed light ahead and doused the flashlight. Two hundred yards of careful walking brought him to a steel mesh. Here the new tunnel joined an existing one. He stood in the darkness and waited.
Yes. Here comes the rumble again, much louder, swelling and growing, rushing toward him.
He stood watching as a subway train rushed by with a roar, the passengers plainly visible in the windows, standing, sitting, reading, talking to each other. And as fast as the train had come, it was gone, the sound fading.
Henry Charon extracted a subway map from his hip pocket and consulted it in the dim glow of the flashlight. He traced the lines and looked again at the layout of the system, committing the routes to memory. The avenues and streets and subway lines, they had to be as familiar to him as the ridges and mesas of the Sangre de Cristos.
With the map back in his pocket, he examined the steel fence carefully and the padlocked mesh door in the middle of it. He could cut that lock if he had to. A Yale. He would buy one just like it, just in case.
It felt strange here in this tunnel, walking through the darkness with just the glow of the flashlight and the smell of earth in his nostrils. In fifteen minutes he arrived at the cavern that would someday be a subway station and picked his way around and through the scaffolding. He found the opening to the outside world, kicked the plywood off, then reset it.
It was chilly on the street. After buttoning his coat, Henry Charon walked along absorbing the sights and sounds, looking, examining the terrain yet again, searching for cover, committing everything to memory.
Could it be done? Could he do it?
Even if he pulled it off, did everything absolutely right and fate had no nasty little surprises for him — like a cop at an unexpected place or a tourist snapping pictures at the wrong time — Tassone and his unknown masters were still the weak links.
Who did Tassone work for? How many people in Tassone’s organization knew of the New Mexico hitter, Tassone’s trips, the cash in the suitcases? Were any of these people government informers? Would they become so in the future? Were any of them alcoholics or drug addicts? Would someone whisper to a mistress, brag at a bar?
All who knew the identity of the assassin of the President of the United States were serious threats for as long as they lived. They would always carry this immense, valuable secret. If they were ever arrested or threatened, the immense, valuable secret could always be sold or traded.
The project tempted Henry Charon. The preparations, the anticipation that would grow and grow, the kill, the chase afterward, just thinking of these things made him feel vigorously alive, like the first glimpse of a bull elk against a far ridge on a clear, frosty morning. Yet the unknown, faceless ones could ruin him at any time. If he successfully escaped he would have to live with the possibility of betrayal all the rest of his life.
Yet you had to weigh everything, and the hunt was what really mattered.
Henry Charon walked on, thinking again of the hunt and how it would be.
CHAPTER FOUR
On Sunday, T. Jefferson Brody woke up alone in his king-sized bed in his five-bedroom, four-bathroom, $1.6 million mansion in Kenwood. After a long hot shower, he shaved and dressed in gray wool slacks and a tweed sports coat that had set him back half a grand.
Ten minutes later he eased the Mercedes from the three-car garage and thumbed the garage-door controller as he backed down the drive.
T. Jefferson Brody should have felt good this morning. Friday he had deposited another fat legal fee in his Washington bank and shuffled another equally fat fee off to the Netherlands Antilles on the first leg of an electronic journey to Switzerland. He had done some calculations on an envelope last night, then burned the envelope. The sums he had managed to squirrel away were significant in any man’s league: he had over four million dollars in cash here in the States on which he had paid income taxes and six million in Switzerland on which he hadn’t. That plus the house (half paid for) and the cars, antiques, and art (cash on the barrelhead) gave him a nice, tidy little fortune. T. Jefferson was doing all right for himself.
The fly in the wine of T. Jefferson Brody was that he wanted a lot more. He knew there was a lot more to be made, a whale of a lot more, and it just didn’t seem that he was getting a share commensurate with his contribution. The things he did — the things only he could do — enabled his clients to make mountains of money, yet he was left with the crumbs that dribbled from their napkins. Just fees. Never a percentage of the action. Of course, lawyers traditionally have received fees for their services, but T. Jefferson Brody’s services weren’t traditional.