Carson lit up a cigarette and walked through the suite of offices and cubicles to make sure everyone was gone. He checked Stafford’s office, but there was nothing there, except the reports and binders. He turned off the overhead lights and walked back down the hall. There were two sets of windows in his office, one that looked out at the parking lot by the railroad siding, the other that looked into the flea-market warehouse. He opened the elderly Venetian blinds and peered into the semidarkness of the warehouse.
Wendell Carson had grown up poor in New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman with a drinking problem. His mother had been a waitress, and there had been three unhappy children stuffed into one room of a dingy, crowded. ‘ apartment in beautiful downtown Newark. From his early teenage years on, he had dreamed of escape, and he joined the Army in 1960, on the day after he graduated from high school. He went first into the infantry and then, after bribing the company clerk, engineered a lateral transfer into the Quartermasters Corps. He had been smart enough to advance to buck sergeant by 1966. Sensing that Army duty was about to turn serious, he elected to get out just before Vietnam blew up, but not before learning the ropes about petty larceny from some of the older NCOs. He’d used his veteran’s preference to get a civil service job at Fort Bel voir, near Washington, D. C., in the personal property shipping office. After mastering his own job, which took about two weeks, he had begun sniffing around the household goods warehouses, looking for what he knew had to be there — namely, a ring of thieves who pilfered the shipments bound for Army posts all over the world.
Carson was no street thug. He had neither the physique nor the stomach for the physical side of crime. He had always been a paper-pusher, and it was at Belvoir that he first established his strategy for life: Don’t steal anything yourself. The trick was to make the guys who did the actual stealing pay him for top cover, such as protection from the inspectors, adjustments to shipping invoices, prompt payment for the claims that inevitably came back from the military people at the new destination, judicious assignment of work crews to particular shipments, all in return for a piece of the action. It had never been big money, but. it had been steady.
Over the years, he had parlayed his sideline into increasingly larger-scale situations as he moved around from job to job within the organization that eventually became the Defense Logistics Agency, until finally he landed in the central office that administered the sale of surplus defense materials throughout the country. Surplus sales was the mother lode of opportunity for a paper-pusher with the inclination to jigger the system to his own benefit, and Carson had burrowed deep into the system. In 1983, the entire surplus sales auction system was decentralized, forcing him to evaluate which of the several DRMOs around the country might offer the best situation. He had come to Atlanta in 1983, then moved up to the head job eight years later. Tangent had contacted him in 1994, and he had been a reliable buyer. Carson now had almost thirty years in the civil service. He had been ‘Spending a lot of time lately figuring out how and when he was going to retire, and then the cylinder had fallen into his lap.
One million dollars. A life-changer.
He reset the blinds, locked his office door just to be sure, and then went over to his desk to sit down. He stretched his hands out and confirmed that they were still trembling. He thought about Lambry. Was he now a rriurderer? He kept coming back to it: Bud had attacked him, after all, not the other way around. So really, it had been self-defense. Yeah, self-defense necessitated by the fact that the both of you stole something: a million-dollar something. And then there was the dream.
He had begun having the dream Friday night. Something about being swept along in a river at night, together with many other people. Somehow he knew they were all dead. The river was black and cold, and he was having trouble staying afloat because he was carrying the cylinder. They moved downstream in total silence until the rolling thunder of an enormous waterfall became audible. The dream ended with him sailing over the edge, with all those dead faces staring at him as they plunged down into oblivion.
He opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, the same dream. Tonight he was going to take a damn pill.
He got up and walked over to the steel bookcase. He removed two fat binders from the top shelf. He reached through the space to grasp the cylinder with both hands. There was no red plastic tube now, just the heavy stainless steel cylinder, covered with decals and seals bearing dire warnings. He held it in his hands for a moment, caressing it. A million-dollar stainless-steel log. The metal was cold. He put it back.
He’d been in a state as to where to hide it after Bud had brought it to him. At first, he’d thought somewhere out in one of the warehouses, where he, as manager, had unrestricted access. But so did everyone who worked out there, and one of them might find it. He’d then thought about the demil facility, but other than the self-contained Monster, there were no hiding places in that building, no nooks, crannies, or hidey-holes. He’d been afraid to break his ironclad rule about never taking anything physically out of the DRMO complex. He looked up at the gleaming cylinder, noting its steely perfection while trying to put its deadly contents out of his mind. It was as safe here as anywhere in the facility, unless he received an indication that the Army had learned it was missing.
He pulled the binders together and returned to his desk chair. The building was silent except for the sounds of the big vent fans running out in the warehouse. He thought again about that girl in the airport, and the strange way she had looked at him. What had Stafford said?
Granite ville, that was it. He pulled a state map out of his desk and looked that name up in the grid index. B-9. North Georgia mountains.
That figured: The girl had that pinch faced, hillbilly look to her.
Everyone knew that a lot of those people up there were dumber than stumps, so why did Wendell Carson faint in the middle of Baggage Claim, out of a clear blue sky, not having had the flu, as he’d told Stafford?
He could not forget her eyes, locked onto his, or how he had been unable to tear his own eyes away.
He fingered the coordinates on the map, and found it. Graniteville. A tiny dot at the edge of the federal wilderness areas up along the northern border. It had to be one of those depressing little side-of-the-mountain towns, where the children occasionally came with six fingers per hand and not too many branches in their family tree. It wouldn’t be hard to find a girl like that in a small town, but was she even a threat? How could she be? He sat there for a moment, drawing the name Graniteville on his desk blotter and circling it idly with a ballpoint.
He put the map back in the drawer. No, he thought. Wendell Carson’s only problem is this policeman — investigator — whatever he was. Forget about the girl, he told himself. All you have to do is keep Stafford in the dark. Long enough to work out the delivery arrangements, and how you’ll get your money without getting bumped off in the process. Wendell Carson wasn’t a criminal, really, not in the case-hardened, street-tough sense of the word, but he knew that for a million in cash, his normally casual relationship with Tangent might change. And there was the obvious time bind: All of this had to happen before the Army found out the cylinder was gone, assuming they would. Tangent seemed to think they would, and Tangent was a Washington guy.