Sandy tapped his breast pocket where he’d slipped the bullet he’d taken from the lab after the ballistics test had been run on the Sig Sauer. You never knew. The lieutenant with a drop piece that belonged to someone else was not a good thing. Hanging onto the slug could be a good thing, given who now owned the Sig. Gloria from Wyoming had better watch her step.
He pounded the steering wheel in frustration and then pulled back onto the road, did an illegal u-ie, and headed back toward town.
Chapter Twenty-two
For what seemed an eternity Charlie waited for the director to respond. He imagined he could hear the wheels spinning as his boss processed what he’d said.
“My doorstep, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
Another long pause and time ticked away. Charlie wondered if indeed early retirement didn’t lurk just around the corner. He thought it could be worse. There were things he always wanted to do besides skulk around the agency’s basement. A little time in the sun, Barbados or the Seychelles. He’d heard they were very nice, like Bali when it was still the Bali he’d read about in his old copies of National Geographic. And then he would…what would he do? The truth about Charlie—he didn’t really want to do anything other than what he did. He loved his job. He may have been the only person in the metro-DC area who did.
“So, you think Ike Schwartz may be at risk?”
A shift in the direction of the conversation. The director did not want to talk, it seemed. Okay, they would play that piece as a duet. “Yes, I do.”
“You’ve been trying to track him?”
“As I said—yes, until now.”
“You’re not trying to find him anymore? Why?”
“Sir, given what I have told you, if you were me, would you?”
Another long silence. More thinking on the part of the director. “Garland, I can’t talk about the monitoring right now. You will have to trust me on this. Now, what do you plan to do about Schwartz?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Nothing? I thought you said he might possibly be in trouble.”
“I did, but to trace him through our system would be counter-intuitive under the circumstances.”
“Explain.”
“Sir ? Okay, for the sake of continuing the discussion, I will concede that the monitoring may have some purpose other than that which seems obvious to me. Nevertheless, if I haven’t been able to find him using up all the leads I currently have, what is the chance someone else, with fewer, will?”
“You mean if you can’t find him, no one can?”
“Sort of. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have the edge here. But I believe that Ike is safer this way than running the risks associated with continuing to search for him with someone watching.”
“You don’t think he needs to be warned?”
“I didn’t say that. I said under the current circumstances, he’s better off if he stays wherever he is and hidden.”
Once again the director’s response seemed glacially slow in coming. While he waited, Charlie reflected on his own words. His choice of vocabulary and sentence structure, he realized, shifted to a more impersonal and formal mode when he was suspicious of his listener. He wondered if the director noticed. So what if he did? Not only was Ike his friend, but the director owed Ike for a few close calls as well.
“What about his fiancée?”
“Ruth?”
“Yes. What about her? They could get to him through her.”
“They are together. Both out of sight.”
“Her mother, what’s her name, Evie Saint Something?”
“Eden Saint Clare? No problem, I have a man babysitting her everywhere she goes.”
“Okay, then that will have to do for now.”
“The monitoring from your office, too?”
“We’re done, Garland.”
The line went dead. Something was clearly out of whack. Charlie, for the first time in a long time, felt afraid. He called his man in Chicago and told him to move in very tight to Ms. Saint Clare. If necessary, keep her clear from “friendlies.” The guy didn’t sound too happy about that part.
He locked up but didn’t go straight home. There were too many loose ends flapping about that he needed to think about. The director had left the answer to his question hanging. It was too important a question to brush off, but that’s what he’d done. Charlie knew that the director held Ike in high regard, but he also knew that being director of the CIA meant he had many balls in the air, and sentimentality in determining which stayed in play and which were allowed to fall would not be factored in when making the choices. If there was something about Archie Whitlock that needed to be permanently erased, for example, the director would order the erasure and any ancillary problems, theoretical or human, if necessary. He wouldn’t like it, but he would do it. Collateral damage, within certain boundaries, was considered SOP. And, if the director thought too much had slipped from his control, Charlie might find himself included in it as well.
That said, it should be obvious that if the director knew something needed to be done about Archie or Ike and the other two, it probably needed doing. And Charlie was enough of a realist to know that he would look the other way if Ike were taken down by someone on the inside. For the first time, Charlie began to question his job.
He pulled into an all-night diner and slouched to a back booth. A waitress dressed in a pink-frilled poodle skirt brought him coffee. He ordered a slice of pie à la mode which he did not eat. He needed to think. There had to be some other way. There had to be.
His ice cream melted.
***
Ike turned the gas in the Coleman down, and the lantern’s hissing abated and slowly shut down leaving only the glow of its mantle to light his way to bed. He managed to slip under the duvet as the light faded to insignificance. King-sized beds had not found their way to Aunt Margaret’s cottage—nor had queens. Double beds, for those used to something roomier, take some getting used to. Ruth hitched over.
“So, do you wonder if Charlie is still looking for you?”
“Still?”
“Didn’t you tell me he called as you were clearing out of your office?”
“Oh, I guess I did say that. Yes, he called. That’s when Essie told him we were camping. If he ever looked, Charlie will have given up by now. He should know that no matter what sort of emergency he can dream up to lure me back into the Puzzle Palace, it won’t work.”
“Still, he gets you all the time, Ike. He calls. You pretend not to care about his problem and then you go rabbiting off to save the world.”
“I can count on the thumbs of one hand the number of times I have rabbited off in what could even remotely be described as saving the world.”
“You’re being modest. You know what I mean.”
“Ruth, when you were playing Sleeping Beauty back in the fall, Charlie was there for me and, I might add, for you. He was there for me when I couldn’t sort out what happened in Zurich. So was the director, as a matter of fact. Charlie was there for me when I needed him. I try to reciprocate.”
“But you are hiding from him now.”
“Ruth, if Charlie really wanted to find me, he would. If he hasn’t by now it can only mean he has no real reason to and he is respecting our wish to be alone.”
“What about the tent business?”
“I don’t for a minute think that would fool Charlie. That’s for lesser minds. I told you, spook paranoia. No, Charlie would have jumped right over the tent trick and headed north. Since he hasn’t, there is no reason to expect he’ll showing up at our doorstep looking for breakfast.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“You don’t sound positive, pal. Okay, and you’re done playing policeman with Deputy Stone?”
“Almost.”
“What do you mean, almost?’
“I want to check out Staley’s house and look for that water study. Since the house is connected
to his murder case, still on it, one could say.”
He said it and he believed it, but something still nagged at Ike about the Staley business besides the presumed hydrologic study. Something about that tower was buried deep in his memory—where nightmares go to hide, and when you think you’re done with them, they jump out and ruin a peaceful night’s sleep. He wished Charlie would show up. Perhaps he could help him remember. He wanted to ask him why a weather tower seemed so important. Oh yes, and why did the name Frank Barstow also set off alarm bells? Little ones to be sure, but large or small, a warning should never be ignored. More paranoia, he guessed.
He would tell Ruth he wanted to take a walk over to Cliffside in the morning.
“I can hear you thinking, Schwartz. It better be about me under this duvet in a short nightie and not about crime and punishment in one form or another. It’s very cold, dark, and lonely in the guest room.”
“I was thinking it’s time to Google you.”
“Oh, you are a dirty old man. Hey, watch the leg.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Charlie felt that anyone witnessing the next hour’s activities would brand him as paranoid or moderately stupid. But caution, a trait he’d developed in his early years at the agency, convinced him not to go straight home. He went, instead to a Walmart. There he bought a few items of clothing, toiletries, a disposable phone, a note book, and a screwdriver. A second stop produced a decent bottle of Scotch. He used the screwdriver to switch the front license plate on his car with one he lifted from a sedan parked next to his. People rarely checked their plates, and if they did the odds were it would be the rear one when they loaded their groceries or, in this case beer or bottles. His last stop was a motel on New York Avenue toward the Maryland line. It was not a very attractive neighborhood, never had been, but at the same time it wasn’t the sort of place where anyone looking for him would go. He booked a room, paid cash, and backed into his parking spot so that the Massachusetts plate on the front bumper would be facing the street.
If asked, he would describe the room as tired—worn bedspread, frayed carpeting, an excess of yellowed caulking around the tub rim where the grout had cracked and the wall behind begun to flake away. The whole place was in serious need of a coat of paint, new curtains, and furniture that didn’t look as if they had been Goodwill Store rejects. But, on the plus side, it was clean and quiet. The traffic along New York Avenue somehow did not seem to penetrate its walls. Someone had, in fact, made an effort to make it as attractive as possible with a sprig of forsythia in a cracked vase and, importantly, all three door locks worked. Good enough.
He took a shower, turned on the TV, and poured three fingers of the Scotch in the plastic cup that came wrapped in cellophane in the bathroom. His other choice was the Styrofoam version that came with the in-room coffee machine. Somehow Scotch in Styrofoam didn’t work for him. Plastic seemed marginally better. At least it looked correct.
He had some serious thinking to do. He did not turn on his new phone. Not yet. He frowned at the advances of technology that made the world a safer place but at the moment were making his life difficult. He wished he’d kept his old Nokia. That one was made before manufacturers, in a moment of public spiritedness, put geo-positional tracking chips in their cell phones. He could have left the old Nokia powered up. He made a mental note to scour second-hand stores and garage sales and find one. A nontraceable phone had its occasional uses, and in his line of work probably justified the extra monthly expense. He doubted the phone provider would put one of those old clunkers into service, but he knew a guy who could do it for him, for a price. Then again, maybe the guy could simply disable the chip in a new phone. That seemed like a better idea. Ike had introduced the guy to him years ago.
Ike. Where was Ike?
He pulled out the shiny new notebook and started writing—lists. The first began with the report of Archie Whitlock’s alleged accident. He worked at that list for an hour, dredging through his memory for details he’d read, conversations he’d had. He put that one aside and began a second, a to-do list this time. He needed to find Ike before the director, or whoever for whatever reason they were looking, found him first. That tent business might fool some folks but he knew Ike. He’d headed north. But where? He had no answer for that. He scratched at the paper for another half hour and then, satisfied with what he’d accomplished, he turned off the light and went to sleep.
***
The LVPD’s fax machine beeped to a halt and night duty officer picked up the stack from its out tray. He skimmed them quickly and then walked through the squad room pausing at various desks to deposit one or more of the sheets. Robbery, homicide, missing persons, and so on. He wasn’t sure what to do with the last bit of paper so he put it back in the tray for the day clerk to deal with. Identifying the Jane Doe down in the morgue would have to wait a few more hours and then depend on the relative devotion to duty by the day clerk due on duty in three hours and who, at that particular moment, had regretted the four margaritas he’d downed in a fast forty-five minutes on a dare from his drinking buddy and brother-in-law. Thus, it would be several more hours after he came on duty, before anything as mundane as delivering a fax to the appropriate cop would rear its head through the fog and pain of an Olympian-sized hangover. So, even though the LVPD now had the identity of their mugging victim lying in the morgue, it wouldn’t make it to her toe tag until sometime the next day.
***
It was an hour before dawn, Ike guessed. He hadn’t lived at this latitude long enough to work out the difference in sunrise and sunset times between those in Maine as opposed to Picketsville. He checked the luminous dial of his watch and discovered he could not quite make out the exact position of the hands. His doctor back home had suggested he get his eyesight checked.
“When was the last time you had your eyes refracted?” he’d asked.
Ike couldn’t remember. He’d never had a problem, always been 20/20.
“You know, as you age,” the eye doc had said, Ike thought condescendingly, “the lens begins to harden and the muscles that change it weaken. You probably will need reading glasses at least.”
Ike had thanked him and had promptly forgotten the conversation. Now as he squinted at the blur in front of him he thought the doc might have been on to something. He got up and padded across the room to the door where he’d hung his field jacket. He slipped it on against the chill and eased his way downstairs, being careful to avoid the step with the loud squeak. In the parlor, he rummaged through the boxes and bags until he found the toss-away phones. He turned one on to check for reception. He knew there should be none but he’d seen a tower as they cleared the harbor, and some of the newer phones, even the cheap drugstore numbers like this one, had a greater range than they used to. No luck. He repacked the phone. Tomorrow he’d head to Cliffside and check out Staley. Dead or alive, the old guy was beginning to bug him. Charlie was the only person he knew who might be able to find him some answers. Certainly not Deputy Stone, the Boy Scout posing as a policeman. He climbed the stairs and reentered the bedroom. In his absence, Ruth had sprawled across two-thirds of the bed. Getting back in without waking her was going to be a problem. He lifted one arm and laid it across her chest. Then he carefully shifted her leg—the bad one—and slid in between the covers.
“Where have you been, Schwartz?”
“Been? You think I’ve been somewhere?”
“I heard you thumping around downstairs. What were you doing?”
“Bathroom. I am developing the old man’s syndrome.”
“Yeah, right. So, how come I didn’t hear a flush?”
“You’ve forgotten or are still slightly comatose. We have an outhouse up here, remember. Short of a hurricane, outhouses don’t get flushed.”
He waited for her response, and when he heard her regular breathing, he guessed he wouldn’t get one. He needed to get back to sleep before she rolled onto her back and began to snore. Love may be blind, but it isn’t
deaf.
***
Across the Potomac River in Virginia, two men sat ensconced in a black SUV parked outside Charlie’s condo. They had been there all night. As the sun rose yellow-orange over the capitol they reported that Garland had not returned home and asked what they should do next. They were told to sit tight until they were relieved. Under no circumstances were they to let the place out of their sight.
Chapter Twenty-four
The director of the CIA had too many things on his plate to have to worry about some damned-fool Congressional hearing. He called in the assistant director for public affairs and briefed him on what to say and where to dissemble when he met the solons on their own turf. He dismissed him with a caution not to let the bastards try anything funny, and then he called in his personal aide.
“Good morning, Director. Bad night?”
“Pure crap. What explanation did you dig up for me to explain why Garland’s software pointed him to me?”
“Still working on it. We have time. These guys are clever; I’ll say that for them. Luckily, they do not yet know that I have been shadowing Charlie for two months and so whatever they do to him will have no effect on our ongoing operations.”
“Do to him? I don’t want anything to happen to him, you understand?”
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