It can’t be about the cylinder, he told himself again. It just can’t be.
There is no way in hell anyone in the DLA could know about that. The fear rose in his throat, a poisonous upwelling of warm bile. Despite his every effort, his heart began to pound again. His face felt flushed. If not the cylinder, then maybe Lambry? Not possible, he thought. Much too soon. He squeezed his eyes shut to make the images go away, but they came anyway, as they had all weekend. Even his wife, Maude, had noticed, and these days, Maude was oblivious to just about everything.
As much as Bud Lambry had pissed him off, he had never meant for anything so god-awful to happen. He looked around the claim area again, trying to focus on something, anything, to erase the memory, but it wasn’t working. He remembered every bloody detail.
“Are you all right, sir?” someone asked from a few feet away. He nearly jumped out of his skin. A handsome woman with a teenage girl at her side was giving him an anxious look. The girl, he noticed, was giving him an altogether-different look. She had dark eyes, and she was staring at him from behind the woman’s arm with an expression of unmistakable horror.
As if she had somehow witnessed what he had just remembered.
He found his voice somewhere back there in his constricted throat.
“Yes, I’m … fine. I have … a really bad headache, that’s all.”
The woman nodded sympathetically. He looked away, scanning the neon numbers on the flight board above the carousel, and then noticing the crowd of people grabbing for bags. He looked anywhere but at the woman and that girl. He realized with a start that the DCIS guy’s flight number was flashing on the board. He glanced around for someone who might be a senior investigator, looking everywhere, desperate to think about something else, to sweep aside the terrible image of Lambry’s skull vibrating like the heel of a loaf of bread in an electric slicing machine. An accident, he told himself again, not supposed to happen, not like that, certainly not like that.
And all because of the cylinder.
He swallowed hard again and concentrated on spotting the DCIS man, but no one looked the part. There were the obvious businessmen chatting on cell phones while they waited for their bags. There were three beefy young men muscling sunburned forearms into the hobbling train of bags on the carousel, hoisting out golf bags, but there was no one who looked like a Washington guy. They had a look, those Washington people.
He tried to compose himself, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw that damned girl still staring at him. He turned his back on her and tried not to think about Lambry or the cylinder, but the image of it bloomed in his mind anyway: a stainless-steel cylinder bearing all those seals and warning labels. The treasure of treasures that sharp eyed Bud Lambry had pulled out of the shipment of supposedly empty weapons containers from Utah.
He tried thinking about the money: A million dollars. Cash. He visualized a small mountain of money. He remembered the phone call to Tangent, his contact in Washington. “I’ve got what looks like the guts of a chemical weapon. Are you interested?” Tangent had asked him to read off the nomenclature printed on the side of the container and then hung up. The offer had come back five minutes later: a million in cash.
Delivery instructions to follow. But it was going to have to be soon.
Very soon.
And what is Tangent going to do with the cylinder? Not my business, Carson thought quickly. In fact, he fervently did not want to know. But of course he did know. Tangent was going to sell it into the international arms market. An image of what had happened on that Tokyo subway flashed through his mind, all those crumpled red faced bodies, throngs of dazed commuters desperately clutching their throats, eyes streaming as their carbonized lungs fought to draw breath; dozens of spastic figures on the ground, surrounded by dozens of helpless cops.
There, was that the guy? No. Well, maybe. And then he had another thought: What if this cop guy is here about the other thing? The auction scam? He felt his heart begin to pound again. Not now, he thought. Jesus Christ, not now. He stared hard at the man heading for carousel five.
Get a grip, he cautioned himself. The cylinder is your ticket to ride.
With that much money, you get a whole new life. This is what you’ve been waiting for and stealing for all your life.
A man who might be the DCIS investigator was definitely coming toward him now. He was wearing a good suit, had a muscular build, and was carrying a large briefcase in his left hand. His right hand was stuck awkwardly down in the pocket of his coat jacket, as if maybe he had been injured. He had a dead-serious cop face on him.
That’s him, Carson thought. Senior Investigator David Stafford, looking right at him, and not necessarily in a very friendly way, either. Carson glanced around involuntarily, wondering if he was sweating visibly, and half-expecting to see a phalanx of uniforms closing in on him, but there was only the crowd milling around the carousels. And that damned girl.
Still watching him.
Look away, he thought.
Can’t look away.
He stared back at her, unable’ to disengage those dark eyes fastened on his like little lasers, and then, suddenly, despite himself, he saw once again the top of Bud Lam bry’s head disintegrating in a cascade of cooling oil and bright red blood, all to protect the deadly secret of the cylinder, gleaming now in his mind’s eye like some alien artifact, suspended in the air between himself and the girl. He tried to tear his eyes away from hers, to see where that agent was, but then his vision tunneled down until all he could see was the cylinder, and beyond that, the girl’s pupils glittering at him, boring into his brain; and then he heard a roaring noise in his ears and found himself immersed in a sudden wet darkness.
Stafford swore out loud, startling the people around him. He had spotted Wendell Carson just as soon as he’d come into the baggage-claim area.
The Atlanta DRMO manager’s ID picture and a brief bio had been in the case file he had studied on the airplane. Fifty-five-year-old white male, five-eight, receding hairline, roundish face, glasses, paunchier than his file photo. Stafford had been about twenty feet away when he saw Carson lock eyes with a teenage girl standing near the baggage carousel, then saw him collapse like a sack of potatoes onto the floor, all in the space of about two seconds. Some of the people standing near him were backing away while others moved in to help.
Stafford pushed his way through the crowd to see what the hell had happened. By the time he got to Carson, a striking black-baked woman had her arm around Carson’s shoulder and was helping him to sit up. The teenager was standing a few feet back from Carson, still staring down at him, an expression of either extreme distaste or fear on her pinched face. Now what the hell is this all about? Stafford wondered as he knelt down on one knee and put his left hand on Carson’s right shoulder.
Carson’s head was up, but he looked dazed as he pushed his glasses back on his face.:-. “Wendell Carson? I’m David Stafford. Can you hear me?
Are you okay?”
“He didn’t look well a moment ago,” the woman offered, speaking over Carson’s head. Stafford had a quick impression of bright green eyes, a milky white complexion, and almost blue-black hair. “He said he had a bad headache.”
Stafford started to reply, but Carson was trying to stand up. “Okay,” he was mumbling. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy there. Not sure …”
Two black men in suits arrived at that moment and helped Carson to get back up. One was looking Carson over while the other spoke into a small handheld radio. The woman and the teenager began to back away.
“Do you need medical attention, sir?” the first security man asked.
Carson shook his head. “No, I’m okay. Just got dizzy. Hot in here.”