by Thomas Perry
“What about tomorrow?”
He could hear the smile returning to her voice as she said over her shoulder, “Ask me tomorrow.”
37
The radiance of the sun just rising behind the horizon outside the east windows made entering the big conference room at dawn feel like walking into a dream. The light was beautiful, golden. In a few minutes it would shine through the broad, moist leaves of the jungle plants outside the glass with such intensity that the droplets left over from the three-thirty watering would evaporate in minutes. But the sky to the west was still that deep purple-blue of the desert night that made the colors of the Las Vegas lights glow brighter, like millions of flares burning at once.
Max Foley looked around the room and verified with mild satisfaction that he was the first to arrive. He supposed it wasn’t surprising. The complexity of Buckley’s mind seemed to Foley to have been built up like a muscle by a lifetime of worrying about eighty things at once. He had probably spent much of the night getting up over and over to see if any news had come in. Salateri had probably spent most of his night screaming into his telephone to find out why it hadn’t. All three partners had been living in their suites upstairs for two months, and it was starting to feel like a siege.
Foley walked to the private bathroom at the far end of the room and knocked, then opened the door with his key. He glanced at the key, as he often did, before he put it back in his pocket. There were only three copies of that key. He had seen them listed once on the roster for the hotel complex: Universal Grand Masters. They were the keys to the kingdom. They would open any lock that any other key in the hotel would open, and a few more besides. “We three kings of Orient-Tar,” as his kids used to say. That was—what? Two marriages back, before he had become rich enough to make giving away half his visible assets too steep a price for getting laid now and then. Foley stared in the mirror at his shave, combed his hair, and went back out into the conference room, then looked at his watch. It was after five o’clock, and he was getting impatient.
Foley walked to the end of the vast conference table and sat down in his chair. He glanced at the three identical piles of newspapers that had been left here for the partners and picked up the paper on the top of this morning’s pile. It was the Idaho Statesman. He thumbed down the pile, reading the mastheads: Salt Lake Tribune, Denver Post, Spokane Spokesman-Review. It looked as though the staff had just bought every paper within a thousand miles of Kalispell. He returned to the top and spotted the words in the lead article that had been circled.
“Montana State Police confirmed that Calvin Seaver, the Nevada man held for questioning in the shooting, has been ruled out as a suspect and released.”
The muscles in Foley’s shoulders and elbows locked. He let the newspaper drop from his hands as he tried to reconcile what he had read with what he knew. Foley and his partners had sent Seaver out to find Hatcher and kill him. A man had been shot. Seaver had been caught a few miles away with the murder weapon in his motel room, powder residue on him, and false identity papers. Foley had always acknowledged that there was some remote possibility that Seaver might not be convicted of the murder—there could be warrant problems or something—but the notion that he would be released had never entered Foley’s mind.
Foley’s eyes fell on the pile of newspapers in front of Buckley’s seat. He leaned forward and lowered his head to be certain. Yes, if he looked at it from the side, he could see an indentation in the shape of a circle. Buckley had set his coffee cup on the newspaper. Buckley had been here and gone.
Foley studied Salateri’s pile of newspapers, but they seemed to be untouched. He swung his chair around, picked up the telephone, dialed Salateri’s suite, and let the phone ring fifteen times.
He walked out of the room to the partners’ private elevator and used his Universal Grand Master key to activate it, then rode it back up to the thirtieth floor. He rapped on Salateri’s door, then kept knocking until his knuckles were sore and the knocks grew fainter. He took out his key and unlocked the door.
Foley pushed the door open, stepped into the big living room, and surveyed the rest of the suite through doors left ajar. Drawers had been yanked out of the built-in dressers to be dumped into suitcases, then thrown on the floor. Salateri had not even bothered to close the floor safe and push the antique Persian rug over it after it was empty.
Foley went out, locked the door, and walked along the hallway and up the fire stairs to Buckley’s suite. He unlocked Buckley’s door and took in a sharp breath. The place looked untouched. Maybe Buckley was asleep in one of the bedrooms. Foley stepped in, closed the door behind him, and took two steps toward the master bedroom before he noticed the painting over the sideboard. The Matisse on the wall had been replaced by a reproduction of a Watteau. Foley spun around to look at the lighted glass display case on the wall behind him. The spot that Buckley had designed as a shrine for his Fabergé egg was now occupied by a small black-and-orange urn that had curly-headed Greek wrestlers squaring off along the sides. To Foley it looked about as real as the ones in museums, but he knew better. It was a cheap fake, and Buckley was gone.
Foley stepped from room to room in the suite and savored Buckley’s premeditation. He had left nothing here that was likely to be of value, but a casual observer would not have noticed that anything was gone. Buckley must have spent several nights packing up treasures, slipping them out of the hotel, and replacing them with junk. No, Foley decided. This was all too elaborate. Buckley had probably been preparing for something like this for years, the way people in flood zones kept a bag packed.
Foley closed this door behind him too and locked it, then walked down two flights to his own suite. As he packed his suitcases he tried to estimate the dimensions of his problem.
Seaver had been hired because he was a cold-blooded, competent watchdog. Now he was a watchdog with rabies. He was already locked inside the house with the family, and he was certain to be getting the urge to bite somebody. He must have used his cop experience and credentials and connections to cut himself a spectacular deal. But a spectacular deal was something like a short sentence, or even a reduced charge, not a free ticket on a murder. What did Seaver have to offer that the cops wanted more than they wanted the man who had shot some hapless schmuck through a restaurant window? There was only one possibility. He must have given them a sniff of the project in upstate New York.
Foley tested the opposite point of view. Suppose Seaver had not turned informant? If Seaver had an alibi, the cops would have had to let him go. God knew, if anybody could set up a solid alibi and go kill somebody, it was Seaver. But the thought only gave Foley a sick feeling. Hiring a couple of killers to go after a nice, gentle kid like Pete Hatcher was one thing. Sending a team of thugs to stab a man like Calvin Seaver in jail and having them arrive after he was loose was another. Seaver was an old pro, and the ones looking for him were a pick-up team of second-stringers hastily assembled and sent into the game without a plan. Even if he didn’t know yet that his bosses had sent killers to silence him, by now he knew that they had cut him loose when he got arrested. He had been made into an enemy.
If Seaver now had an impulse to come here and get past the security to pay his respects to his bosses, it was hard to imagine a way to stop him. He had designed the whole system personally, supervised the installation of the hardware, hired the men and told them where to stand. Making Seaver into an enemy had been the wrong decision.
Foley stopped himself. He had to fight this new, neurotic tendency to construct ways to blame himself for everything. This problem was not Foley’s fault. It wasn’t. He and Buckley and Salateri had been absolutely right to assume that Pete Hatcher was a threat. After waiting three months for the threat to be removed, they had been right to send Seaver out to handle it. That was his job, and they paid him more than enough to be entitled to assume he would do it. When Seaver bungled it and got arrested, they had been right in acting immediately to disassociate themselves from him an
d act to cut their losses. The only way Seaver could have gotten out of that mess was to talk.
Now Foley had to assume that Seaver was sitting in some secret, safe location—didn’t they usually put people like him on some military base?—giving investigators from Washington everything. In a day or less, there would be the F.B.I., the Justice Department, and the police agencies of several states. They would make travel impossible and staying here unthinkable.
A couple of days after that, there would be raids at the offices of politicians in Albany, New York. A few powerful old men in New York City would start to notice that there were a lot more parked delivery vans, and city crews digging up the streets near their favorite haunts. Those old bastards wouldn’t wait around for some grand jury to vote an indictment. They would do exactly as Foley would do in their position: act to cut their losses.
Foley packed very efficiently and methodically. He had never seen the attraction of sinking enormous amounts of money in paintings and bric-a-brac like Buckley, and he didn’t have fifty pounds of gold jewelry hidden under a Persian rug like Salateri, so he didn’t have to think very hard. He nearly filled his two suitcases with cash, threw on top an accordion envelope that contained a few passbooks for offshore banks, last month’s stock and bond statements, and his passport. He slipped a few personal papers in with them, put on his favorite sport coat, stuck his prescription sunglasses into the pocket, and walked out the door.
As he stood in the private elevator and felt it descend thirty floors, he marveled at how simple and inevitable it suddenly had become to walk away from a two-billion-dollar company. There really was no decision to make. If Seaver had not talked, he would probably be on his way here to kill whoever was left. If he had talked, the police were on the way, and so were people a hell of a lot scarier than police. And if Seaver hadn’t talked, and wasn’t mad, then Pete Hatcher had probably heard of Seaver being caught running around the country with a gun, and that would convince Hatcher that he had to talk. And as of this morning, even if none of this happened, Foley would have the problem of explaining to the world the disappearance of his two partners. Foley’s position had become untenable. This was like walking away from a burning building.
The elevator opened and he dragged his two suitcases out on the garage level. Then he thought about selecting the right car to take to the airport. His Saab was probably the best one for this, because it didn’t look like something a man like Foley would drive.
He took the keys off the board and carried his suitcases over to the dark-green, stubby Saab. It was the name of the car that suggested his first destination. He would go to Sabi Sand Game Reserve in South Africa. He would stay at the Singita Lodge and begin making calls to find his next stop while he was there. For the moment he had a strong interest in places where he could see people coming from a long way off.
Foley opened the trunk. As he lifted the first suitcase in, he had a sudden, uncontrollable urge to look over his shoulder. It was like a chill at the back of his neck. He whirled quickly. There was nobody in the dark behind him, no visible shape at all on this level except his four other cars. But there could have been. It could have been the first F.B.I. agent, or Calvin Seaver waiting to get even, or some nightmare guy that the Mafia had sent to get rid of a bad memory. It could even be nothing more than a thief, somebody who knew that Foley had a lot of money. In a day or so, when the word got around that the three partners had bailed out, there would be a lot of people like that. He would have to watch for them, too.
It occurred to him that he was never going to be able to stop looking over his shoulder, even if he lived for a year or more. As he started the car, a familiar thought entered his mind, but it was for a new reason. He wished he knew a way to find that woman who made people disappear.
SHE WILL HELP YOU DISAPPEAR,
IF IT HELPS YOU STAY ALIVE …
The Jane Whitefield
Novels
by
Thomas Perry
Published by Ivy Books.
Available in bookstores everywhere.
Jane Whitefield is in the one-woman business of helping desperate people disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork.
VANISHING
ACT
But when Jane opens a door out
of the world for an attractive fugitive
named John Felker, she walks into
a trap that will take all her heritage
and cunning to escape.
Jane Whitefield is the patron saint of the pursued, a Native American “guide” who specializes in making victims vanish. Calling on the ancient wisdom of the Seneca tribe and her own razor-sharp cunning, she conjures up new identities for people with nowhere left to run.
DANCE FOR
THE DEAD
But when a calculating killer stalks an
innocent eight-year-old boy, Jane faces
dangerous obstacles that will put her
powers—and her life—to a terrifying test.
Thomas Perry was born in Tonawanda, New York, and received a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He has been a laborer, maintenance man, commercial fisherman, weapons mechanic, university administrator and teacher, and television writer and producer. His previous Jane Whitefield novels are Dance for the Dead and Vanishing Act. He is also the author of The Butcher’s Boy, which was awarded an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and other novels. Thomas Perry lives in Southern California with his wife and two daughters.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 8d72d613-aac0-4b01-acdb-d08a036399de
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 20.6.2012
Created using: calibre 0.8.56, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Thomas Perry
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/