Brewer had ruined everything. She felt silly having kissed him. Yes, she could see it clearly: Vermont was the right path for her. She would continue her quest for Rumbh, solve the case, clear Brewer’s name. And never see him again.
Then she remembered that on the street in front of the Chinese restaurant he had kissed her.
Her first stop was the library of the Central Intelligence Agency in McLean. The Biography File contained biographic data on tens of thousands of international figures.
She had been preparing for bed, sitting in her housecoat just before midnight. Her phone rang.
“Hello,” she said.
“Mrs. Hale?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see your car down in the parking lot?”
She looked down from her window. “Yes. The powder-blue Mercedes. Why?”
“I have a message for you. Ready? One. Two. Three.”
The Mercedes exploded. The hood sailed over a half-dozen cars; the trunk lid burst open; all the windows blew out; a fireball shot up more than fifty feet in the air. Burning parts from her car showered down and bounced all over the parking lot.
The driver’s seat was filled with furious flames.
Where’s your bomb-proof subpoena, Madeline?
Brewer arrived in a cab at dusk that evening. He walked around the parking lot, looking at the scorched concrete. Four people stood nearby, talking and gesticulating.
Pebbled window glass from Madeline Hale’s car crunched under his shoe soles as he studied the marks. It had been a large bomb. And it had been detonated by remote control. Probably from a car: a cellular telephone in one hand to call Hale and a small battery-operated detonator in the other. One, Two, Three, Boom. “A message for you.”
When she opened her apartment door, she stood looking at him. Then she said, “I’m okay as long as I don’t think about it.”
“Don’t think about it and it’ll go away,” Brewer said.
“Okay, Charlie. I have to swallow my pride and say you were right the other night. Your methods are atrocious. You are also a latter-day Victorian romantic who has women on some kind of a pedestal. But you were right.” She stepped back to let him in.
When he crossed the threshold, she said, “One more point: That bomb doesn’t change a thing. I’m not going to run and hide. I intend to persist until I get Rumbh.”
“My money says Rumbh wins.”
“Whether you believe it or not, I can handle this.”
“Handle it. There’s only one way to handle it. If you’re really serious and if you were trained to handle situations like this you would still have to go underground. Disappear. So he can’t get at you. Then you throw out your nice-Nellie book of rules and ethics. Instead you dog him relentlessly. Work behind the scenes. You bribe; you deceive; you break in. You use telephone taps. You use muscle and threats and blackmail until you get him. And at all times stay underground. To get him you have to become just like him. See? The salami tactics of relativism at work and play”
“Force and violence,” she said. “Those are your methods. Not mine.”
“They’re his. Just go look at the scorch marks.”
“If you’re so concerned, then help me.”
“You could be forever, getting this Rumbh,” said Brewer. “Leave him to me. I’ll find him and settle with him when I get the time and the money.”
“I have plenty of both. Let’s clear your name now.”
“Come on, Madeline. If anything ever happened to you while we were working together—”
“Then we’re at an impasse. You won’t stop and I won’t stop.”
“You’ll stop, or he’ll stop you.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’re a hell of a woman.”
“And you’re a hell of a man, Charlie Brewer. I wish we had met at another time under different circumstances.” She reached up her arms and kissed him. “Take good care of yourself.”
“If anything happens to you—”
“No long faces, Charlie.”
Down in the parking lot he watched his cab arrive. He opened the door, then paused to look up at her windows. He could see her face looking down at him, the black hair and pale skin, that quizzical tilt of her head. He was glad he couldn’t see those pale-blue eyes.
She lifted a hand to him and dropped it. Brewer hesitated, stepped back onto the sidewalk, hesitated again, then turned, and without another glance got in. As he drove off, he took a long last look at the bomb’s scorch mark.
9
No one knew where Eric Rock was. Each day McCall checked his dailies, looking for some word on the man. But Rock was as elusive as a ghost.
After a week of waiting for someone to report on Rock’s whereabouts, McCall took matters into his own hands. He would locate Rock personally.
The only hard fact McCall had gleaned was a phone number in New York City—Rock’s message center. People reached Rock by speaking to a message unit at that number, then waiting for him to call back—which he sometimes never did.
But the man himself could be anywhere in the world. He got his messages by telephoning his recorder once or twice a day from wherever he was at the moment, and that could be Rome, New Delhi, Singapore, or San Francisco. He seemed to have no fixed home.
It was that message center that McCall focused on.
McCall arrived at the disused safe house later than he had planned. By the time he’d parked, sunset was less than an hour away. Quickly he lifted the two cases by their handles out of the trunk of his car and carried them across the sidewalk and up the concrete steps to the doorway.
He paused to check the pedestrians, then studied the parked cars, then the windows of the brick row houses that lined both sides of the street. Most of them were apartments with professional offices on the first floor. Windowpanes reflected the red ball of sun.
McCall took bare note of the flawless autumn weather before he unlocked the door and stepped into the inner hallway. The building was supposed to be empty, and he stood listening for sounds: footsteps, scraping chairs, shutting doors. But the interior was quiet—almost as though the building were listening to him.
It had been used variously over the years—as offices for a special Latin American disinformation program, as a duplication center until the new one was completed, and periodically as a safe house.
By the time he’d reached the third floor, his arms were shaking from the heavy cases and he was panting. He unlocked the door to the front room and pushed it open.
The phone was sitting in the middle of the bare floor. Beside it stood the folded mattress cot he’d ordered. McCall put down the two cases, then crouched and picked up the telephone receiver. He got a dial tone. Good.
He took a pad from his pocket and looked at the number on the telephone and compared it with the number written on the pad. They were identical. Then with a screwdriver he removed the base of the telephone.
Now he opened the larger case. This was a highly sophisticated computerized telephone-tap unit. The top face of the unit was covered with toggle switches, phone-jack receptacles, and digital-number squares. From the side of the unit he drew out a sixteen-inch cable and attached its two alligator leads to the contacts inside the base of the telephone. The other wire he plugged into an electric outlet. He worked several toggle switches and watched the computerized numbers dance on the display face.
Now he opened the other case and revealed a multiheaded tape recorder. He checked the tape deck reel, drew out the electric lead, and plugged it into an outlet. A second lead with a magnetic head he attached to the headset of the telephone.
One last piece: He withdrew a set of earphones from a drawer in the phone tap unit and plugged the jack into the audio circuit. He was ready.
McCall referred to his pad again. He looked at the second telephone number written on it, then placed it on the floor. He picked up the phone from its cradle and dialed the number. He replaced the phone on its cradle and put on the
earphones. He could hear a phone ringing. On the third ring it clicked, and a recorded voice greeted him.
“This is Eric Rock. Please leave your name, your phone number, and any message, and I will get back to you. Wait for the tone.”
The harmonica bug went to work. It probed Rock’s telephone message recorder, identified its code number, and then displayed that code number in its green digits for McCall to note down. Next it signaled the number to Rock’s message unit. A moment later Rock’s message unit was feeding its collected messages into McCall’s tape recorder. Messages from all over the world were pumped out.
“Rock, this is Petersen. Give me a call. Use the Athens number.”
“This is the Angel Gabriel. You recognize my voice, Rock? Call me. I’m back in Paris and I have news on Fawzi.”
From a marine radio telephone: “Hello, this is Lipstick Two. We’ll be docking at the Cove in the Bahamas on the twenty-ninth. Can you come down? I have someone here who’s dying to meet you. And she’s just the right age. Also I have a very interesting deal for you.”
In all there were fourteen messages on the recorder. McCall knew the identity of several and guessed at the identity of the others. A ghouls’ gathering: itinerant arms peddlers, failed intelligence agents trying to scrape a deal together, mercenaries stirring up small wars, terrorists with their beggars’ bowls garnering money, then shopping for bombs, and corrupted arms buyers from various governments around the world, looking for kick-backs. One voice he was sure belonged to a Polish defector who specialized in selling biological and chemical horrors.
They were never at rest, this parade of monsters, twisted minds, and mass murderers. Not all the arms control people in all the governments in the world could keep up with them.
With the last message, the harmonica bug shut down except for the camp-on circuit that waited for Rock to telephone to his message center. When he did, McCall’s unit would trace the call and identify the number Rock was calling from. With fourteen messages on his recording unit, Rock must not have called in for a day, perhaps two days. He was bound to check in at any moment.
Now all McCall had to do was wait. He looked at his watch. It was after five, Washington time. Around ten P.M. in London. Midnight in Jerusalem. Seven P.M. in Tokyo. The wandering Rock might be anywhere, awake, asleep, dancing, eating, planting a bomb—but wherever he was, sooner or later he would call his message unit.
As soon as the harmonica bug identified the number Rock was calling from, it would switch on another circuit to monitor the new number and record any phone calls Rock would make from it. It would also simultaneously continue to record all calls to Rock’s message center.
All that was needed was one phone call from Rock.
McCall sat there on the floor cross-legged like a swami about to utter an oracle. He looked at the slanting autumn light on the wall. It filled him with sadness. It was the waning time of the year, when he usually did his annual summing-up and found things wanting: How many Eliott Monroes had there been this year? How many others flourished on his work? Another year of use and abuse.
The wan autumn sun on the wall reminded him that the whole magnificent season was slipping by almost without his notice. On the Chesapeake this was some of the best sailing weather of the year, a marvelous time he always looked forward to, especially now that the children were old enough to share it with him.
How in the world had he come to this empty room on this bare floor, in this unused building, to stalk a fellow mortal with the avowed purpose of having him murdered?
He looked at the illegal wiretap he had just installed. How one crime quickly leads to another—a series of others. Plotting murder was just the beginning. But where was the ending?
Man began in the mud, crept from the slime, grew his three or four brains, evolved into a mammal, and lived his thundering history: Horsemen galloped across the plains to sack cities; the assassin’s knife flashed in the harem and changed the course of a civilization; men invented numbers, scratched the earth with bent twigs to discover formulas, dammed rivers, devised tools, machines, weapons, flung rockets into space. And all of it was just a preamble to this moment when a man sat cross-legged before two boxes to snare and murder another. The only thing that had changed since the first murder was the sophistication of the weapons.
McCall stretched and sighed. This was liable to be a very long wait and he didn’t need thoughts like that. With the earphones on, he lay back on the cot and yawned.
The light failed and soon he was in the dark room of a dark empty house in Washington, D.C., watching the green digital clock on a computerized tap count off the seconds, the minutes, and the hours.
He dozed.
The phone rang. It was 6:46 in the evening. Rock’s machine droned its instructions, and a woman replied: “Eric. This is Valerie. Will I see you Saturday?”
McCall paced through the darkness. In the ambient light of the streetlamps, he walked from room to room and back again, hearing his heels bump on the bare floor. Standing in the middle of the empty kitchen he could hear faint noises from the building next door. He stood at the window and looked down into the street: people walking dogs, carrying packages, cars cruising for parking spaces, traffic light on the corner going through its endless iterations.
McCall lay down on the cot again.
A nightmare woke him. He lay on his back with the earphones on his head and heard the Tumbler cry his last as he fell through the air. It had become a regular occurrence: At odd whiles, unexpectedly, when brushing his teeth, conducting a meeting, telling a joke, he heard the Tumbler’s horror-stricken shout call to him. The ultimate hockey stick.
He thought of law school and wondered what had ever happened to his great plan to conquer the world. Love had happened to it; marriage happened to it; babies happened to it; salaries and the need to feed happened to it. Reality had happened to it. The great plan lay buried under the rubble of years. He placed the crook of his right arm over his eyes and wished that Rock would call.
The phone rang hours later. McCall sat up, disoriented for a moment. He looked at the computer clock. It was 2:10 A.M. The message unit began playing its fifteen messages. Rock was opening his electronic mail.
And while he listened, McCall’s unit was tracing the call. The first digits that appeared were 763. Then 891; 993; 444; 582. Gotcha.
A few moments later, when all the messages had been played, Rock punched his code and the message center erased its messages and reset itself to receive a new batch. Rock hung up.
But McCall had what he had come for. His harmonica bug unit had already set up a new monitor to tap the phone Rock had called from. It would record any phone calls Rock would make from that number.
McCall waited a half hour for Rock to make his calls. He didn’t, and McCall decided the man had gone to bed. No matter. The machine would wait for him. In the morning McCall would pump Rock’s phone number into his office computer and learn the address.
He stood up stiffly and left the equipment set up on the floor. He went down the stairs in the darkness and out of the building. There was a sweep of stars in the clear sky and a chilly breeze at his ankles. No moon.
McCall drove home. He paused in the upper hallway, peered into his son’s room, then listened at his daughter’s door. The tarot cards must have a lot to say now.
He got into bed next to his wife and wondered still if he was actually going to kill those three men. He felt a great loneliness.
The next morning, McCall’s first business was Rock’s telephone number. He looked at the piece of paper he had written it on, exactly as it had appeared on the digital readout of his telephone tapping machine. It took his computer only a few minutes to identify the owner of that number, an unlisted telephone about ninety miles from Washington:
Sherard Pawlson
Windmere Polo Farms
Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania
What in the world was Rock doing on a polo farm? And more important, where
was he going to be on November 26?
Meantime other things were beginning to jell. On his desk he found a report from London:
“Re: Peno Rus. Reliable source says Rus is planning an arms seminar in the Hotel Royal Bestwick in London November 22 through 26. Attendees’ names n/a yet.”
So now he knew where Peno Rus would be on November 26. Talking to a roomful of arms dealers in London.
Also on his desk McCall found a tape from the Chief of Station, Mexico City. It was a recording of Slane’s meeting with Joli and Gomez in the Hotel Orizaba. He played it, bemused, then played it again.
The ingenuity of the arms traders often amazed him: taking over a country through the pretext of making a film. His former chief, Dan Dempsey, had told him years ago: “Remember, it takes as much hard work and brilliant planning to be a successful villain as it does to be successful at anything else. Your better-grade villain is a very busy cat.”
Slane’s game didn’t concern him; if everything went the way McCall planned it, before the coup Slane would be dead—somewhere between the Baja California desert and the Leeward Island Free State on November 26.
Now McCall knew where Slane and Rus would be on November 26. Two down. One to go. Where would Eric Rock be? At dusk, he returned to the safe house and picked up the day’s taping of Rock’s phone calls.
He sat on the cot and listened to the tape. He was fascinated. Rock was charming, witty, solicitous of his friends. He was a delightful raconteur and highly intelligent withal. He might prove to be the toughest target of the three.
Rock had been very busy, telephoning all over the world, chatting, listening to offers, swapping tales. But the most interesting piece of information McCall picked up was Rock’s contretemps with a ten-year-old Egyptian girl. Rock regaled several of his friends who shared his interest in children.
“You would love this kid,” he said to an arms dealer in Frankfort. “A fascinating little tart. Too bad I have to give Cairo a wide berth for a while. I can’t wait to see her again. But I hear her father owns the biggest scimitar in Egypt and you know what he’ll do with it if he catches me.” (Laughter.) Rock added wistfully: “I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.” (Laughter.)
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