He slipped his hand under his coat and touched the butt of the automatic again, then pulled his hand away.
No one in sight. Just the windows and the dim light and the black shapes of the pillars that hold up the roof. And that sound.
The terror seized him then. He started shaking as the low animal sound curled around him and echoed gently down the vast, empty, dark room. Someone past screaming, someone who had screamed his lungs out, who was now past words and pleas and prayers, someone who was past all caring. Someone who moaned now only because he still breathed.
There was something else. A smell! He sniffed carefully. Burned meat. Yes, burned meat, the smell of fried fat, acrid and pungent.
Oh, my God!
Harrison Ronald Ford walked forward. Toward the door cracked open and the light leaking out.
The moans were louder, and the voice.
“You betrayed your brothers, your brothers of the blood. Sold out to the honky fucks, sold out your flesh and blood, sold out …” Freeman McNally. Harrison Ronald recognized the voice. Freeman McNal—“What did they pay you? Money? You’ll never spend it. Women? You’ll never screw ’em, not with what you got now. Ha!”
McNally was insane. Crazy mad. His voice was an octave too high, on the verge of hysteria.
“Kill me.”
Silence.
A scream. “Kill me!”
Harrison Ronald Ford pushed open the door. The stench was overpowering.
A naked man was tied to a chair in the middle of the room and above him an unshaded bulb burned. At least, he had once been a man. Strips of flesh hung from his frame. His crotch was a mass of raw meat. His face—Harrison walked closer to see his face—only one eye left—the other socket was black and burned and empty. On his chest were more burns. Amazingly, there was very little blood.
“Put the gun away, Sammy.”
He looked around. Other men sat in chairs around the wall. On the floor was a laundry iron with bits of flesh still clinging to it, a wisp of smoke rising.
“Put the gun away, Sammy.” It was Freeman. He was standing against the window. He had a pistol out and was pointing it.
Harrison looked down. The Colt was in his hand. He lowered it, then looked again at the man in the chair.
“Kill me.”
“The shithead sold us out. He was whispering tales to the feds. He admitted it, finally.”
He could kill them all. The thought ran through Harrison’s mind and he moved his thumb to the safety. Five of them, seven rounds. Freeman first, then the others. As fast as he could pull the trigger.
Freeman walked over to Ford and stood looking at the man in the chair with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Isn’t that some heavy shit? I’ve known him as long as I can remember. And he sold me out.” Freeman snorted and shook his head. The sweat flew from his brow. “And all this time I thought it was you, Sammy. Shee-it!
McNally shook his head again and walked back to the window. There he turned and pointed his pistol at Harrison Ford. “You got a gun. Kill him.” He said it conversationally, like he was ordering a pizza.
The tortured man was staring at Ford with his one eye. His hands were still tied behind the chair, or what was left of his hands. Traces of white showed through the seared flesh—bones.
“Shoot him,” Freeman said, making it an order.
Harrison took a step closer. The eye followed him. Now the badly burned lips moved. He bent down to hear. “Kill me,” the lips whispered.
Harrison thumbed off the safety. He raised the Colt and pointed it above the raw, oozing hole where the man’s left ear had been. The ear itself lay on the floor by the iron.
“Sorry, Ike,” Ford said, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IKE Randolph’s body was in the trunk of the car when Harrison Ronald parked it on E Street in front of the FBI building. Freeman had told him to get rid of it, dump the body in the street somewhere. The mutilated corpse would certainly be a little point to ponder for anyone who someday might entertain the notion of crossing Freeman McNally.
Yeah, Freeman. Whatever you say, man. Four of them had tossed the body in the trunk and Harrison had driven away. He hadn’t waved good-bye.
And he pondered the point.
The sun was up.
Sunday. Eight a.m. The streets and parking places were empty. In a few hours the suburban malls would open and the last-minute Christmas crowds would pack the parking lots and surge through the sprawling temples of retailing. The shoppers would swarm over the downtown malls too, but that was two hours away. Right now the only people on the streets were alcoholics and derelicts. Paper and trash from overflowing cans swept by the car, carried by the wind.
Harrison sat behind the wheel with the engine off and listened to the silence.
He had made it. He was still alive.
His hands shook.
The relief hit him like a hammer and he began to sob.
He was tired, desperately tired. The tears rolled down his cheeks and he lacked the energy to move.
Done.
Well, hell, I gotta get to Hooper. Give him the keys to Ike Randolph’s hearse, then get some sleep.
He remembered to lock the car, then climbed the stairs to the FBI building and walked through the open foyer to the quadrangle. He went down the stairs to the quadrangle plaza and crossed to the kiosk where the Federal Security guard stood. The uniformed man watched him approach.
“Tom Hooper. Call him.”
“And who are you?”
“Sam … Harrison Ronald Ford. Evansville, Indiana, police. He’s expecting me.”
“If you want to stand over there, sir, I’ll call up and see if he’s here.”
He walked away so the rent-a-cop could watch his hands. He was too tired to stand. He sank down against the wall and crossed his arms on his knees and lowered his head to rest on them.
He was sitting like that, crying, when Thomas Hooper spoke to him six or seven minutes later.
“There’s a corpse in the trunk of the car.”
“Who?” Freddy and Hooper stared at Ford.
“Ike Randolph. They tortured him. He’s a real mess.”
The FBI agents looked at each other.
“We gotta ditch the body.”
“Why?” Freddy asked, incredulous.
“We gotta, man,” Harrison insisted.
“Now listen. We go to the grand jury on Monday. Monday evening or Tuesday they hand down murder indictments and we scoop up Freeman McNally and his lieutenants and lock them up. They won’t get out on bail. There’s no bail for murder. Then we give the grand jury all the rest of it and let them come up with a couple hundred counts.”
Harrison was tired. “You listen. Freeman gave me tonight off. But if that body don’t show up someplace, he’ll smell a rat. The very first thing he’ll do is check my apartment to see if I’m there. I won’t be, man, I can guarantee you that. I ain’t ever going back there. Then Freeman’ll know. Maybe he’ll skip. Maybe he’ll be waiting with heavy ordnance when you go to bust him. Maybe he’ll put out a contract on me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder!”
“We can’t just go dump a corpse in the public street and—”
“Why not?” Tom Hooper asked.
“Well, hell, we’re the cops, for Christ’s sake.”
“We dump the corpse and wait half an hour and call the police. Why not?”
Hooper was thinking of the grand jury and the lawyers. Just because the FBI wanted a quick indictment was no guarantee there would be one. It might take a week. And as he sat staring at Harrison Ford, he realized that he was going to play it Ford’s way or the undercover man might go to pieces. Ford might not last a week.
“Where you parked?”
“Right in front of the building on E.”
“Come on, Freddy. Let’s go get this over with.”
“At least let’s pull the car into the basement and
let the lab guys photograph the body.”
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Harrison roared. “The only reason, the only reason, I’m still alive after ten months of this shit is that nobody knew I was undercover. Now you’re going to let the lab people see the car and the body and me? Do I look suicidal?”
“Forget it, Freddy,” Hooper said. “We’ll just be creative on our reports. Won’t be the first time. Not for me, anyway.”
In the car they talked about it. They drove down toward Fort McNair. On the east side of the army post was a huge, empty parking lot. Weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. Beer cans and trash strewn about.
The parking lot was bounded on the west and north by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Across the wall were huge old houses, quarters for senior army officers stationed in Washington. To the east, sixty yards or so away, were small private houses, but brush and trees obscured the view. A power relay station surrounded by a chain-link fence formed the southern boundary of the two-acre parking area.
They didn’t waste time looking the place over. Ford backed up toward the brick wall and popped the button in the glove box to release the trunk lid. He left the engine running. All three men got out and went around back.
Freddy took one look and heaved.
“For the love of—”
“Look at his hands! They burned his fingers off!”
“Come on, you shitheads,” Ford growled. “Grab hold.”
They laid the corpse on the ground and got back in the car. Ford jerked the shift lever into drive and fed gas. Freddy retched some more.
“What I can’t figure,” Harrison mused, “is why Ike? Why’d he think Ike was the stoolie?”
“Remember Senator Cherry?”
“The mouth.”
“Yeah. We told him Ike was our man inside.”
Harrison Ronald braked the car to a stop and slowly turned to face Hooper, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. “You mean Ike was a cop?”
“Naw. He was just a hood. But we figured that since Cherry was talking out of school and there was little chance we could shut him up, we’d better do something to cover your ass. So we gave him a name—Ike Randolph.”
Harrison faced forward. He flexed his fingers around the wheel.
“And Freeman killed him. That’ll put him in prison for life. Too bad about Ike, but—”
“Freeman didn’t kill Ike.” Harrison Ronald said it so softly Freddy in the backseat leaned forward.
“What say?”
“Freeman didn’t kill Ike. I did. Oh, Freeman tortured him, mutilated him, but he wanted to spread the fun around. He’s that kind of guy. I killed him.”
“You?” Freddy said, stunned.
“It was Ike or me, man. If I hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d be a hundred and eighty pounds of burned dead meat this very minute. Just like Ike.”
“Drive. Goddammit, drive!” Hooper commanded. “We can’t sit here like three fucking tourists in the middle of the street. Everybody in town will get our license number.”
Harrison put the car into motion.
“You killed him,” Freddy said, still wrestling with it.
“What in hell did you think was gonna happen?” Harrison roared, sick of these two men and sick of himself. “Fuckhead! You white fuckhead! You knew if Cherry talked Ike Randolph was a corpse looking for a grave to fall into. And now he’s dead! Well and truly dead, dead as I would be if anybody had whispered my name.”
“Why didn’t you dump the body before you came to us?” Freddy asked.
“I wanted you to see it. Ike was a pathological asshole, but he didn’t deserve that. I wanted you coat-and-tie FBI paperpushers to see it and smell it and get it smeared all over your clean white hands. So sue me.”
The ceiling was at least five thousand feet Henry Charon estimated as he drove up the interstate toward Frederick, Maryland. Hazy, five or six miles visibility. Not like out west where you can see for fifty miles on the bad days.
He knew where he was going, a little park along the Potomac. There should be no one there in December, a week before Christmas. The place had been deserted last week when he found it after consulting an aviation sectional map and a highway map. He had drawn some lines and done some calculating.
Just before he got to Frederick he exited the four-lane and turned south on a county road. The two-lane blacktop wound southward through fertile farming country of the Monocacy River valley. Neat homes and barns stood near the road and cattle grazed in the fields.
Henry Charon turned right onto a dirt road just past an abandoned gas station and proceeded west for 4.2 miles. The road he wanted was sheltered by a grove of trees. There!
No fresh tracks in the mud. And not too much mud. That was good.
He parked the car and pulled on his parka and gloves. Before he put his feet on the ground, he pulled a pair of galoshes over his hunting boots and buckled them.
It took him half an hour to check the area. No hunters or fishermen on the river, no one in the fields to the north.
The only house visible from the parking lot was a half mile or so away on the other side of the Potomac River, in Virginia. He checked the house with binoculars. No one about.
Occasionally a light plane flew over. Charon didn’t look up. He was only sixteen nautical miles north of Dulles International and seven or eight miles north of Leesburg. Harper’s Ferry was about fifteen miles to the west. So there were going to be planes.
He got the radios from the trunk of the car and went over to the pile of gravel near the bank, where he sat down. From this gravel pile he had an unobstructed view straight up and to the south and southeast from the zenith down to the treetops on the other side of the river, about ten degrees above the horizon. That was enough. More than enough.
He turned on each radio and checked the batteries. He had installed a fresh set in each unit this morning and he had others in the car, just in case. The needles rose into the green.
He selected the VHF frequency band on the first radio and dialed in the frequency for the northern sector of Dulles Approach, 126.1. With the antenna up and tweaked to the right just a little, reception was acceptable. On the other radio he selected UHF, and dialed in frequency 384.9. He was fairly confident they would be using VHF, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Both radios began spewing out the usual chatter between controllers and pilots. Charon arranged one radio on each side of the rock pile and adjusted the volume knob. They didn’t need to be loud—he had excellent hearing in spite of the thousands of rifle shots he had listened to over the years without ear protection.
He got out the sandwich and coffee he had purchased at a fast-food emporium’s drive-through lane this morning. He ate slowly, savoring each bite. The coffee cooled too quickly, but he drank it anyway. It was going to be a long afternoon.
Perhaps. Who knew?
All the preparation, all the planning was over. He was as ready as he would ever get. He thought about the past three weeks, about the plans he had made and contingencies he had provided for.
One chance in four. He had a twenty-five percent chance today, he concluded. As usual, the quarry had the advantage, which was just the way Henry Charon liked it.
Charon grinned. He finished the coffee and sandwich and carefully placed the paper and cup on the backseat of the car, where it couldn’t blow out, yet where he could dispose of it the first chance he got.
Then he sat down again on the gravel and began listening intently to the radios.
He rose occasionally to scan with the binoculars, then resumed his seat.
This little park was on one of the two routes he thought it probable the helicopter carrying the President might take when flying from Camp David to the White House. He suspected that the helicopter would in all likelihood avoid the airport traffic area at Frederick and Gaithersburg. If so, it could pass those two airports to the east and enter Washington heading straight south for the White House, thereby
overflying Silver Spring and Bethesda. On the other hand, if the chopper passed to the west of Frederick it would probably overfly this little park on the Potomac on its way straight down the river into Washington.
As he had studied the map Charon had come to favor the Potomac route. As the helicopter descended into the Washington area noise in populated areas would be minimized by flying down the river. That struck him as just the kind of consideration that a harried staffer would base a decision upon.
Still, he wasn’t a pilot and he knew next to nothing about air traffic control. He hadn’t had the time to monitor the route of other Camp David trips or to do the dry runs that would ensure success at the proper time. This whole thing was pretty shoestring. Yet the longer he spent in this area checking things out, the greater were the chances he would be seen and remembered.
So he would try this. If he got the opportunity, he would shoot. If not, he would look for another opportunity.
One chance in four. Maybe less. But enough.
He sighed and watched the birds and listened to the river when the radios fell momentarily silent. Occasionally he rose and used the binoculars to check the area. There were three picnic tables between the parking area and the riverbank. Near each table was a small stone barbecue grill. In the summer this would be a very pleasant spot for an outing, if you could get an empty table.
It was a few minutes after three p.m. when he heard the call he was waiting for. It came over the VHF radio.
“Dulles Approach, Marine One’s with you climbing to three thousand out of Papa Forty en route to Papa Fifty-six, over.” Charon knew those areas: Prohibited Area 40 was Camp David, Prohibited Area 56 was the White House-Capitol complex.
“Marine One, Dulles Approach, squawk Four One Four Two Ident.”
A Cessna pilot made a call to Approach now, but his transmission went unanswered. Henry Charon turned off the radio, tuned to UHF, and put it back in the trunk of the car.
“Marine One, Dulles Approach, radar contact. You are cleared as filed to Papa Fifty-six, any altitude below five thousand. Report reaching three thousand and any change of altitude thereafter, over.”
“Marine One cleared as filed. Report any change of altitude. We’re level at three now.”
05.Under Siege v5 Page 31