A pale yellow Mercedes coupe pulled up in front of the Boynton Towers Apartments across the street, and a woman got out from the passenger side. McGarvey decided there was something familiar about her. She turned and looked back inside the car, the street light illuminating her face and hair. She was Lorraine Hawkins, the girl with the sommersprossen. This evening she was dressed elegantly in a tight-fitting evening dress and her hair was done up in the back. She was background noise, McGarvey thought. Cover. Yarnell might notice the setup. Might become suspicious. If and when he did, they hoped he would notice her. A normal girl with friends who came and went. Nothing suspicious here. She made a gesture, then shut the passenger door, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the building. A moment later the Mercedes moved off. McGarvey caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel, but he didn’t recognize him.
Day had told him that there were more important considerations now. That Powers and the president would have to be brought in on this. But Janos had not been Day’s friend. Day would not have to face Pat and the children. Nor had Day come face-to-face with Owens; he hadn’t listened to the old man’s story, hadn’t looked into his eyes, hadn’t in the end been witness to the cold wind whipping the flames hundreds of feet above the beach house.
The block was quiet for the moment. The watchers and the watched. As had been happening to him all along, he had the feeling that someone was lurking in the shadows, their eyes on him. But no one was about. There were no odd cars or trucks or vans with too many aerials. No lingering pedestrians. Nothing at all to suggest that his feeling was anything other than paranoia, plain and simple. There was more here though. Something else in the equation. Something he felt he should be aware of. Some flash of intuition that would make all the pieces fit.
He crossed the street, a taxi rushing past just behind him, and he went inside. The elevator was on its way back down. Lorraine had taken it up to the eighth floor but had thoughtfully sent it back. They were paying attention to the details, McGarvey thought, which was very good. Their lives could very well depend on their tradecraft. No use in advertising her floor number. Yet he was surprised that they were still here. He would have thought that by now Trotter would have called them away. Unless his were not the only second thoughts.
Riding up he took out his gun and checked the action, holstering it finally when the door opened onto an empty corridor. The building was quiet. He made absolutely no noise on the carpeted floor as he approached the apartment door. From inside he could faintly hear the murmur of someone talking, but then it fell quiet. He knocked and a moment later it opened. Lorraine Hawkins, her hair down now, stood in the doorway, the Mexican, Gonzales, right behind her, a long-barreled Smith & Wesson .357 in his right hand. The apartment was in darkness. McGarvey could smell the night air from an open window. A big infrared Starlight scope was set on a tripod across the room. The telephone monitoring equipment had been set up on the buffet. Sheets, the tan mack from Lausanne, was speaking softly into the other telephone.
“Anything from his phone calls?” McGarvey asked.
“Nothing that’s worth anything,” Lorraine said, moving back away from the door. “He came in an hour and a half ago. His daughter is with him.”
McGarvey stepped inside. Lorraine closed and locked the door behind him. Gonzales holstered his gun and went back to the scope that was trained across 32nd Street on Yarnell’s house. Sheets turned his back to them and continued with his telephone conversation.
“Anyone else?”
“I just arrived myself.”
She was hiding something, he could see it in her eyes. “Who else is down there?”
Gonzales looked away from the scope. “Your ex-wife showed up about twenty minutes ago.”
“Alone?”
“With a man named Phillip Brent,” Lorraine said.
“They’re over there now?”
“Yes.”
This was not how he had imagined it would be coming back to the States, he thought; Kathleen involved in this business, wittingly or not. From the beginning she’d distanced herself from his work, then later from him. Now she was in the middle of it. At the dangerous core.
He went to the window and looked across toward Yarnell’s house. Even without the glasses he could make out the lit upper-story windows and the vague black squares of the dark attic windows. The watchers and the watched. The listeners and the listened to. A bit of De la Mare came to him; “Tell them that I came, and no one answeredl/ That I kept my word.” But that didn’t matter. There was no honor here, he thought. No one else kept his word.
But why Kathleen? he wondered. Why her of all people? She had nothing to do with this. She’d never had anything to do with it. And for years she hadn’t even had anything to do with him.
“Mr. Trotter is on his way over,” Sheets said, putting down the telephone. “Apparently he’s been trying to reach you all afternoon.”
“Well, he’s found me,” McGarvey growled, dragging his eyes away from Yarnell’s house.
“Would you like something to drink, Mr. McGarvey?” Lorraine asked abruptly.
“We’re shutting down,” Sheets said before McGarvey could say a thing.
“Not with my wife down there you’re not!”
“I’m sorry, sir, but—”
“We’ll just wait until John gets here. You can give me at least that much.”
“He said break it down,” Sheets insisted.
“Bingo,” Gonzales said softly from the Starlight scope. He straightened up and stepped aside, his eyes narrow, his lips pursed. He glanced at Sheets and then at McGarvey and shrugged. “Maybe you want to take a look, maybe you don’t.” He nodded toward the scope. “But it’s something.”
He walked away and went down the hall to the back bedroom. Lorraine and Sheets were watching McGarvey, who felt as if he were on center stage in a sideshow. He looked out the window. Nothing had changed as far as he could tell with his naked eye. Look, don’t look. Stay, go. Think, don’t think. Just run away and keep running. Don’t ever look back. Christ, never look back.
Slowly he bent down to the scope’s eyepiece. At first the images were fuzzy, but when he adjusted the focus, the distant window frame leapt into sharp view, the open weave of the curtains like a patchwork gauze. He was looking into an upstairs bedroom of Yarnell’s house. From this angle he could only see the forward half of the room. A man and a woman stood locked in an embrace next to a four-poster bed. It was a dangerous game they were playing. They had probably snuck off, leaving the others downstairs. The man’s back was toward the window. When they parted, McGarvey was looking into the face of his ex-wife. Because of the effects of the infrared scope, Kathleen looked flushed, which in any event, he supposed she was. The man half turned, as if by request, giving McGarvey a clear view of him. Yarnell.
Oh, Kathleen, he thought. She’d always played dangerous games, but this time she could not know how precarious her position really was. For her as well as for Elizabeth. With nothing to lose, nothing seemed important. All of a sudden he felt a rush of protectiveness toward his ex-wife, and he didn’t know why.
“What is it, Mr. McGarvey?” Lorraine asked.
Yarnell tenderly caressed Kathleen’s cheek with his fingertips, and then kissed her forehead, her nose and again her lips, as if she were the most important person in the world to him, as if this were the most important moment, as if no one else in the world existed. Even from here McGarvey could feel the man’s power. Kathleen would be helpless. Except, he suspected, she’d gone looking for it. But she didn’t know, she could not know Yarnell’s power.