by Stuart Woods
“I see your boxes arrived,” Teddy said. “Did you have them shipped the way I asked you to?”
“I did,” she replied. “My name appears nowhere on them.”
“Good.”
“We’re going to have to go out for dinner,” Lauren said, “since we don’t have any groceries yet. We can pick up breakfast at a convenience store on the way home.”
“Fine with me,” he said, closing the computer. “Another trip to Geronimo? We haven’t been there yet.”
“Sure, that’s fine. Shall I call?”
“Is the phone working?”
“We didn’t get phone service, remember?” she reminded him. “We’re using our cells.”
“Oh, right.”
Lauren called and made the reservations, then brought a drink to him and sat down beside him on the sofa. “What are we going to do with our days, Teddy?” she asked. “I’m used to being busy.”
“Then get busy,” Teddy replied. “Boredom is a self-inflicted wound. Get to know Santa Fe; learn to appreciate the light and the terrain; read books; TiVo the good stuff at night and watch it in the daytime. Maybe we’ll take up golf.”
“It all sounds wonderful,” Lauren replied, clinking her glass with his. “A whole new world.”
22
Todd Bacon landed the B-36TC Bonanza at Santa Fe Airport late in the afternoon and taxied to the Santa Fe Jetcenter, a mock-adobe building with a large ramp. An assortment of aircraft populated the place, from large corporate jets and turboprops to his own turbocharged piston Bonanza.
Todd lost no time in questioning the young woman on the desk. She checked her computer. “No, Paul Janzen, the man who flew the 182 RG, is no longer here. He turned in his rental car yesterday and flew away. He said something about selling his airplane to somebody in Texas,” she said.
“And he’s not returning?”
“Didn’t seem like it,” she said.
“Do you know if he was selling the airplane through a broker?”
“No, sir.”
“Or what town in Texas? It’s a big state.”
“Nope. I only saw him twice, the day he arrived and the day he left.”
“Was there a woman with him either time?”
She looked thoughtful. “There was a woman in here on the day he arrived, but it didn’t look like she was with him. He came in and signed the paperwork for his rental, then he went out to the ramp, got in the car and drove away.”
“Without the woman?”
“Yes. Like I said, she didn’t appear to be with him. There were several airplanes unloading that afternoon, and she could have been on any of them.”
“Can you give me a physical description of the man?”
“I guess he was in his early fifties, dark hair, going a little gray around the ears.”
“Anything else you can remember?”
“No. He was just like anybody else.”
“Do you remember what kind of car he rented?”
She went to her computer, looked it up and told him.
“Thanks,” Todd said, then got into his own rental car, took a good look at the map and drove into Santa Fe. As he got into the city it looked to him like the sort of place he’d like to live himself, and he couldn’t blame Teddy if he’d picked it. He drove to the Plaza and found La Fonda, the big old hotel that had served visitors to the town for decades. It had been nicely updated, and he was given a small suite on the top floor. He opened his bags and got out his computer, then logged on to the Agency mainframe and sent an e-mail to Holly Barker.
Checked out Vero Beach and discovered that Lauren Cade had left some boxes in storage there and that they had been shipped to Santa Fe, but the company had nothing under her name. Arrived Santa Fe an hour ago and checked for 182 RG at Santa Fe Jetcenter, but owner had turned in his rent-a-car and left yesterday. Appeared to be alone on both arrival and departure. Description by woman at the desk vague, could fit hundreds of people. Said he was going to Texas to sell his airplane, no mention of what city.
I’ll follow every lead in Santa Fe tomorrow and report on anything I find. I tried to find a photograph of Lauren Cade in the records of the Florida State Police and motor vehicles department, to no avail. I guess you were right about our friend’s ability to scrub items on databases.
Todd
HOLLY, WORKING LATE at her desk as usual, read the e-mail, and it was nothing less than she had expected. Teddy was a chameleon with endless bags of tricks, and she wasn’t entirely sure that Todd understood who he was up against. Still, he was a resourceful young man who wanted to further impress Lance Cabot, so he was highly motivated.
TODD GREW HUNGRY around dusk, so he showered and changed and stopped at the concierge’s desk in the lobby.
“May I help you, sir?” the young woman said.
“Yes. Can you recommend a very good restaurant for dinner outside the hotel? Something with local color?”
“I’d recommend either Santacafé or Geronimo,” she said. “I suppose Geronimo has more local color.”
“Can you book me a table for one, please?”
She called the restaurant and spoke to them, then turned to Todd. “They have no tables, but you can dine in the bar; you won’t need a reservation there.”
“All right. Thanks.” Todd turned toward the garage, then turned back.
“Can you give me directions?”
“It’s very easy. Turn right out of the parking lot, then drive toward the cathedral and take your next right. Go straight at the traffic light, then take your first left onto Canyon Road. Geronimo is about halfway to the top, and they have valet parking.”
TEDDY AND LAUREN were seated at a corner table at Geronimo, Teddy in his preferred gunfighter’s seat with his back to the corner. He saw a young man enter the restaurant and walk straight through the dining room toward the bar. Bells went off in Teddy’s head. He never forgot a face, but where had he seen this one?
A waitress approached with menus and asked if they’d like drinks. Lauren ordered and waited for Teddy to place his order, but he seemed lost in thought. “Teddy?”
“Oh, sorry. A margarita, please, straight up with salt.” The waitress left.
“Give me just a minute,” he said to Lauren. “I have to think about something.”
“Sure,” Lauren said. She watched as he seemed to go almost into a trance: eyes closed, face expressionless.
Teddy reversed the video recorder in his brain and watched the young man enter the restaurant again, then again. Now he had the face fixed in his mind. Panama City. He had been on his motorcycle and he had just shot the Agency station chief on the street outside the American Embassy, when he’d looked up at the windows of their offices. The young man had been standing at a window. Teddy had seen him before in a local bar. He was Agency. Teddy opened his eyes.
“Everything okay, Teddy?” Lauren asked.
“No,” Teddy said. “Not entirely. There’s someone from the Agency in this restaurant right now.”
“Someone you worked with before?”
“No, he’s much younger than I. He worked in the Panama station only a couple of months ago, and he turned up on Cumberland Island when I was dealing with a problem. There was something of a chase, but I took off from the beach. He put a couple of holes in the airplane that I had to fix later, before I went to Orchid Beach.”
“Is he here looking for us?” she asked.
“Very possibly,” Teddy said.
“But there’s no way he could have traced us here.”
“There’s always a way. I could have made a mistake.”
“Do you want to leave? Should we run?”
“No,” Teddy said. “I have a better idea. Let’s just relax and enjoy our dinner.” They ordered, then Teddy excused himself to go to the men’s room.
TODD BACON SAT at the bar, sipping a margarita. There was a couple at a table near the bar, and it occurred to him that they were a fit for Teddy Fay and Lauren Cade. He was
sixtyish and slim and wore an obvious toupee. She was much younger, blond and attractive. He summoned the bartender and lowered his voice. “Do you know the couple to my left?”
“Yes,” the man replied. “They’re the Hamptons, regular customers.”
“For how long?”
“Ever since I’ve been here, and that’s two years.”
Todd nodded. Well, that would have been too easy. A man walked past him and into the men’s room. A couple of minutes later he walked out and past Todd again. He appeared to be in his early fifties, dark hair, gray at the temples. That matched the description of the man in the 182 RG that was given to him by the young woman at the airport.
Todd shook his head. Now he was getting paranoid. Everybody was looking like Teddy Fay.
TEDDY TOOK HIS SEAT in the dining room.
“Everything all right?” Lauren asked.
“Suspicions confirmed,” he replied.
23
Todd Bacon slept later than he had meant to, then ordered breakfast from room service. He still had one lead to follow, and he finished breakfast in a hurry and showered.
Ten minutes later, he was driving out Cerrillos Road, looking for Adobe Moving and Storage. He found it and turned into the parking lot. A middle-aged man was behind the counter.
“Good morning,” Todd said to the man. “I wonder if you could help me?”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“A couple of days ago you had some boxes arrive here from Vero Beach, Florida. Can you find that shipment in your records?”
The man turned to his computer. “Vero Beach, Florida,” he muttered to himself. “Yes, here it is.”
“Can you tell me to whom the shipment was addressed?”
The man peered at the screen. “No name.”
“No name? How could you deliver it?”
“The boxes, four of them, were addressed to us, and identified by a number.”
“Can you tell me to whom you delivered the boxes?”
“We couldn’t deliver them; we had no name and address. I remember they were picked up here at the office by a woman.”
“Can you describe her?” Todd asked.
“Fairly tall, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Also a baseball cap and dark glasses. I helped her load the boxes into her car.”
“What kind of car?”
“A Lincoln Town Car, I think, silver color.”
“Can you remember anything else about her?” Todd asked.
“No, just that she was very nice. She might have been pretty without the cap and the sunglasses.”
“Thank you,” Todd said and left. A silver Town Car—that’s what the man with the 182 RG had rented. He drove back to the airport to the FBO. The same young woman was behind the desk.
“Morning,” Todd said. “We spoke yesterday.”
“I remember,” she replied.
“You said that the man with the 182 RG had rented a Lincoln Town Car?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Could I have a look at the car?” he asked.
She turned to her computer. “I’m afraid it was rented again. Left half an hour ago.”
“Do you have the credit card information on the man who rented it?”
She looked again. “Paul Janzen, Atlanta, Georgia.” She gave him the address and phone number.
“What kind of credit card?” Todd asked.
“I only have the number,” she said, and to his surprise, she gave it to him.
“Thank you so much,” Todd said, and left, excited now. Back in his own car he dialed the phone number of Paul Janzen. A pizza parlor answered. He called information, but no Paul Janzen had a number in Atlanta.
He drove back to his hotel, sat down at his computer, got into the Agency mainframe and ran the credit card number. To his surprise, it existed but there was no name for it, just the number. Very odd. He got into the FAA database and did a search for Janzen but got nothing.
“This guy is Teddy Fay,” Todd said aloud to himself. “But where the hell did he go?”
TEDDY SAT IN HIS new living room, watching Lauren unpack her boxes. He had examined the packages, and they didn’t appear to have been opened since he left them in Vero Beach. There was nothing in the boxes that would identify Lauren—no tracking devices, either, just clothes, shoes and makeup. She couldn’t be identified from the labels.
“When you picked up the boxes,” he said to her, “did anything unusual happen?”
“No,” Lauren replied. “They were sitting in the office, and the man behind the desk helped me load them into the Lincoln.”
“Did he ask for your name?”
“No. I just gave him the numbers on the boxes, the way you told me to.”
Teddy nodded. The young man—Bacon, his name was—had only two nexuses for him in Santa Fe: the FBO and the storage company. If he was any good at all he would have worked both of them to the bitter end, but in both cases, he would have come up empty. Everything he could learn would have pointed to Teddy turning in the rental car and leaving town in his airplane, which he had done, of course.
“We’re safe,” he said to Lauren. “But we’re going to stay in the house for a couple of days.” She had already been to the grocery store.
“If you say so,” she said. “Why are you so confident?”
“Because I could not have found us with the information he had,” he replied, “so he couldn’t, either. He was sitting in the bar last night when I went to the men’s room, and he didn’t recognize me, so he doesn’t have more than a general description. And we’re driving a different car now.”
“That makes sense,” Lauren said. “He must have come to Santa Fe because we shipped the boxes here, but that’s a dead end.”
“Let’s not ship anything else,” Teddy said. “If we need to leave Santa Fe, we’ll travel lighter. We can always buy clothes.”
“Sure, we can.”
“We’re going to stay in the house for two more days, until it’s time to pick up the airplane, then we’re going to take it to Las Vegas, New Mexico, which is a few minutes’ flight east of Santa Fe. It’s dangerous to backtrack, to take it back to Santa Fe. Bacon could have left word at the FBOs there to call him if I turn up again. If, on the odd chance, we ever need to run, we can drive to Las Vegas in a hurry and take off from there.”
“Sounds good,” Lauren said. “And we should be safe in Santa Fe, because when Bacon leaves he’ll check it off his list and won’t come back, having already exhausted his search here.”
“I like the way you think,” Teddy said. “It’s like the reverse of the cop you used to be.”
24
Barbara woke up at her usual hour, had some breakfast and prepared for the usual visit from Vittorio and Cupie. She cleaned the kitchen, put away her clothes and stuffed her makeup and toothbrush into the bathroom medicine cabinet.
Promptly at nine o’clock she heard the SUV stop outside on the road, and she took her coffee into the bedroom closet again.
“VITTORIO,” CUPIE SAID. “How long are we going to keep making this trip?”
“Until she shows up,” Vittorio replied. “The real estate agent has confirmed that she rented the place to Barbara, and that her lease is month-to-month. If she has gone away somewhere, she’ll return here, and when she does, she’s ours.”
They did their usual walk-around of the little house, peering into windows.
“Nothing’s changed,” Cupie said. “She’s not here.”
“Until tomorrow,” Vittorio said.
THEY WERE CLOSE ENOUGH to the bedroom window that Barbara could hear that exchange. Maybe Jimmy was right; maybe she should go to L.A. for a while. She called Jimmy.
“Hey, baby,” he said.
“I’m taking your advice, sweetheart,” she said. “Can you put me up for a while?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’ll get a plane from Albuquerque today and a cab to you. Should be there late afternoon.”
<
br /> “I’ll look forward to it,” he said.
“Me, too!”
Barbara packed her bag and, being careful to leave the house exactly the way it had been, got the Mercedes station wagon out of the garage and began driving toward I-25, which would take her to Albuquerque. She backtracked a couple of times, driving through residential neighborhoods, to be sure she wasn’t being followed, then kept an eye on her tail all the way to the airport. Along the way, she used her cell phone to book a seat on a flight.
VITTORIO AND CUPIE sat in the SUV, parked just off the Plaza, with a view of the entrance to Eagle’s office building.
“He’s in for the morning,” Cupie said. “Let’s go to Tia Sophia’s and get a good breakfast.”
“Cupie,” Vittorio said with some exasperation, “you’ve got to remember that we’re not watching for Eagle, we’re watching for Barbara.”
“Well, she’s not likely to come to his office, is she? She’s much more likely to wait out near his house and shoot him when he comes home. He’s safe in his office.”
“All right, all right,” Vittorio said, starting the vehicle. “I guess I’m hungry, too.” He drove a couple of streets over and found a parking spot near Tia Sophia’s, a popular breakfast and lunch spot.
“At least we’ll get a table now,” Cupie said. “The breakfast crowd has already gone to work.”
Cupie was right. Soon they were having huevos rancheros.
BARBARA ARRIVED at Jimmy’s house in Beverly Hills a little before six, and he was waiting for her with martinis already mixed. He took her bags upstairs while she relaxed with her drink.
He came back down, poured his own martini and sat down. “So, how’s it going?” he asked.
“Not so hot,” she said. “Ed knows I’m either in town or on my way. Those two P.I.s, Vittorio and Cupie Dalton, have figured out that I rented my house, and they’re out there every day, trying to catch me there. I’m going to have to get a new place when I get back.”
“Sounds like a good idea. They can waste their time looking for you while you’re here with me.”
“Jimmy, tell me more about this pilot of yours—what’s his name?”