“Yeah?”
“Could be. Some of them are IRS people, and some of them are pretty pissed off by the way that operation turned out. They don’t blame the guy in charge when the operation was planned, but they do blame the new guy. They figure it’s his fault things got fucked up and they got a black eye. Some of them are really, and I mean really, mad.”
The new guy was the president of the United States, now vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. His daughter was my cousin Debby.
I stared through the darkness at Joe Begay’s dim figure. “Do you mean to tell me that it’s some pissed-off IRS guy right here on Martha’s Vineyard who’s out to get Cricket Callahan?”
His voice was touched with irony. “You don’t sound surprised. Does that mean there aren’t more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”
Actually there probably were. But my dreams of Martha’s Vineyard didn’t exclude vipers. Every Eden has its snakes, after all.
“Tell me more,” I said.
— 17 —
“Two of the rolled heads from the IRS have places here on the island,” said Begay. “One of them was the deputy director of operations when the girl lost her face. Name of Kenneth Eppers. An old-timer with fingers in a lot of pies. Known as ‘Horrors’ to the troops because of some of the stuff he orchestrated. Lives in a big place in Chilmark. They say he can see both sides of the island from there.
“The other one was Horrors’s favorite up-and-comer in operations. The very one who planned the operation that went wrong, in fact. A tough cookie who did a lot of good work overseas, then came in out of the cold to work in the head office. Woman named Barbara Miller.”
“Never heard of either one of them.”
“I don’t think you travel in the same circles. Barbara’s husband is an international banker and isn’t quite as rich as Croesus, but almost. She used to travel with him or for him and that gave her the cover she needed. His name’s Ben, by the way, in case you ever want to introduce him to anybody.”
“Ben and Barbara. Sound like good names for a couple of dolls.”
“They’ve got a house off Lambert’s Cove Road, up on a hill with a view of the sound. They’ve got a few other houses, too, but that’s the one they like during the summer.”
“You’re a well of information. Where do you get it?”
“I’m a Native American. We’re full of inherent wisdom.”
“Or something else.”
“Our little chat this morning whetted my curiosity, so after you left I made some more phone calls to Washington and a couple of other places.”
The wind rustled through the trees and bushes on either side of Joe’s house, and I wished, not for the first time, that I had eyes like a cat, in case there was something in the darkness that had such eyes and was watching me when I couldn’t watch back. Another desire from my childhood that had never gone away when I grew up. Or maybe I hadn’t really grown up.
I thanked Joe for his information.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m glad to have it.”
“If you need anything else, let me know.”
“I will.”
I climbed into the Land Cruiser and drove home, full of thoughts.
By the time I turned into my driveway, I realized that I felt better than I had been feeling lately, because I was finally going to do something instead of just having things done to me. The feeling was quickly modified.
The agents guarding the end of my driveway ID’d me; then, as one moved his car so I could drive down to the house, the other leaned over my window and said, “A guy came by looking for you. Mad as a hornet. Said something about you and his wife. Burned rubber getting out of here when we wouldn’t let him in.” He looked at me without expression, and I knew what he was thinking.
“It’s all a mistake,” I said. “You’ve seen my wife. Do you think I’m actually after somebody else’s woman?”
He shrugged and stood back. In his line of work he’d probably met a lot of fools. He’d also probably met men who’d left gorgeous women for plain ones. For that matter, so had I, so it was no wonder that my protest might have sounded hollow to him.
I drove down and parked in the yard. There, I dug the flashlight out from under the seat and checked out my thread. No easy task in the starlit night, but worth it when I found no breaks. Back at the house, I found Karen on the darkened porch. She’d been watching my light dance around through the woods. I found a chair and sat down.
“Any breaks in your defensive perimeter?” she asked.
“No. Any sign of visitors?”
“No, but you got a call from some guy who left a message.”
I had a sinking feeling. “What was it?”
“It was about giving you a good beating so you’d stay away from other men’s wives. He didn’t leave his name.” Karen was more sympathetic than her colleague at the end of the driveway had been.
“Mike Qasim. He was up at the end of the drive, too. The agents wouldn’t let him in.”
“You’d better keep an eye open for him. Sometimes these guys do foolish things. On Monday, you can tell him the truth, but you’d better be careful till then.”
Sometimes these guys do foolish things. The words sent facts flipping through my brain. The letters were from somebody mad at the president because of the girl without a face. The bomb that had ruined her had gone off in the Middle East. “Mike” Mahmud ibn Qasim’s people were from over there somewhere in the five-seas area, and Mike was a hothead who was quick to seek out his enemies.
Maybe there were others like him on the island.
I touched a hand to my forehead, as Zee tells me I do when I’m thinking. Why do I do that? I said, “Do you know if your people checked Mike out before the president came down?”
“I can find out. Why?”
I told her my thoughts.
After a moment, she said, “You’re not just mad at him because of this wife thing, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
After another moment, she nodded. “All right. In the morning I’ll find out if he’s on our list or ought to be.”
“It’ll be interesting if he is.” If he was, it was just one more reason for carrying out the plan I’d worked out. “Is Debby asleep?”
“Yes.”
“She a light sleeper?”
“Not a bit. Once she gets settled in, she’s down for the count.”
“Good. She’ll need to be rested.”
“Why?”
“In the early morning, I’m going to move her out of here.”
I could feel Karen’s frown through the darkness. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s too much going on that I don’t know about, and I want Debby to be safe, so I want to move her away from here. I’ll need your help.”
Karen’s voice was firm. “She’s as safe as she’ll ever be. We’re surrounded by security people. Besides, she can’t just go off to who knows where. She’s in my charge, remember?”
“I’ve got a stake in this, too,” I said. “Zee and I live in this house, and if Shadow makes another play, Zee could get hurt, along with Debby. I don’t want that.”
“We have agents all around this place. Nobody is going to get through them.”
“You have a lot of confidence in your colleagues. Did you know that some of your fellow agents guarding the compound at night are keeping themselves awake by watching one of those little plug-into-the-cigarette-lighter TVs that they borrowed from one of the local cops? How much talent would it take to sneak past some guy watching the late-night show?”
“If that’s how you feel,” she said, “I’ll take her back to the compound right now.”
My eyes were getting used to the darkness, and I could see her stand up, a moving shadow against the starlight beyond the porch screens. She seemed to be looking out into the night.
“I can�
��t keep you from doing that,” I said, “but that doesn’t strike me as the world’s best idea. I think Debby’s here because Walt Pomerlieu doesn’t want her there. I think he thinks here is safer than there, and he wants her here while he tracks down the mole who’s there. The trouble is that here isn’t safe anymore, either. We’ve got to take her somewhere else for a couple of days.”
“Like where?”
“How’s your night vision?” I asked.
I thought she turned toward me. “Not as good as I wish it was. Why?”
“Can you see this pistol in my hand?”
She froze.
“I can see you against the starlight,” I said. “Don’t move. Do you see this pistol?”
“What’s going on?” Her voice was hard.
“Answer the question, Agent Lea. Do you see this pistol?”
“No. What are you doing?” Her hands began to shift position.
“Don’t move,” I said, remembering how fast she could be.
The hands stopped. “Be careful,” she said in a soothing voice. “Don’t do anything foolish. Remember, she’s the president’s daughter, and if you do anything to her, you’ll never get away with it.”
I didn’t think I had much time before she made her play, even though she thought I had the drop; but I didn’t need more time. “Don’t worry about Debby,” I said. “And don’t worry about the pistol, either, because I don’t have one with me. But I might have had. In fact, you thought I did.”
“Bastard!” The word came like a knife through the darkness.
“The point is that you and I don’t really know each other,” I said. “None of us know one another. I don’t know anything about you or Walt Pomerlieu or any of the other agents I’ve met, and none of them know about Zee and me, other than what they’ve been able to check out in the last couple of days.”
“We know more about you than you realize!” There was a tremor in her voice, as the need for controlling her fear had passed.
“You didn’t know enough to doubt the gun in my hand.”
She was furious. “You could have gotten yourself killed! That was stupid! Your pistol may have been make-believe, but mine is real! In another minute I might have used it!”
“Yeah, I think you might have, even though you thought I had you cold and that I’d probably kill you before you could clear leather or nylon or whatever it is you use for holsters these days. I think I told the truth just in time.”
“You’re a fool! I can’t believe you did that!”
She wasn’t the first person to think me a fool, nor, probably, would she be the last.
My throat was very dry. “I’m going to have a beer,” I said. “Do you want one?”
“No!”
I went into the dark house, found the fridge by Braille and got a Sam Adams, and came back out onto the porch. The Sam Adams tasted cool and rich, as usual. Manna from heaven. It occurred to me that God might be a brewer, among other things.
I found my chair and sat down. “My problem,” I said, “is that I need to trust somebody, but I didn’t know who that could be. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s you.”
“Why? Because you think I was about to shoot you? What does that prove? What kind of person are you? My God!” I could see her turn and stare back out into the night.
“It’s not just because you thought about shooting me, it’s why you might have done it. You never mentioned any danger to yourself; you only mentioned danger to Debby.”
“Jesus, is that why you pulled that stunt? To find out that I’d die to protect Debby? It’s my job to protect her, for God’s sake! It’s what I do! It’s what the Secret Service does. It’s what we all do. We protect the president and his family!”
“Not all of you,” I said. “Somebody in your outfit is working for Shadow.”
Silence hung between us for a time. Then she said coldly, “You can’t be sure of that.”
“I’m sure enough,” I said. “And so are you.”
More silence. I broke it. “And because I’m sure, I didn’t know who to trust.”
“You can trust Walt Pomerlieu!”
“You trust him. I don’t know him. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if you should trust him, either. That’s why we have to move Debby out of here. We don’t know who to trust.”
“Psychiatrists probably have a term for people like you!”
“Probably. And you’re probably right about trusting Walt Pomerlieu, but I don’t know him, so I’m taking him with a grain of salt. The same goes for Ted Harris and Joan Lonergan. Where did they come from, by the way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they were working for some other agency before they came to the Secret Service. What was it?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“They wouldn’t be old IRS people, would they?”
She made a snorting noise that was almost a laugh. “Internal Revenue people? I doubt it. They don’t seem to be the type to collect taxes.”
She obviously had never had her returns audited, but I decided not to point that out.
“How about the International Research Service?”
She turned from the screen and looked toward my voice. “The what?”
“You never heard of the International Research Service?”
“No. What is it?”
“I don’t know much about it. Can you find out where they worked before they joined your outfit?”
“Why?”
I hesitated. Good grief, I was getting as secretive as the very people I criticized for being overly secretive. Was I actually a closet only-if-you-need-to-know guy? To prove I wasn’t, I told her almost everything I’d been thinking. But not everything. I rarely tell anybody absolutely everything.
When I was done, she was silent for a while, then said, “So Ted Harris and Joan Lonergan know their way around the woods, and you want to know why.”
“Yeah.”
“Because the IRS screwed up the operation that cost that poor little girl her face, and because if they worked for that outfit, maybe there’s a tie-in between them and the threat to Cricket.”
“Debby is her name. Yeah, I think that’s possible.”
“And if that’s the case, then having Ted and Joan out there in the woods guarding this place may be like having the fox guard the chicken house.”
“Yeah.”
“But if it’s not Ted or Joan or both of them, it’s somebody else on the inside.”
“Yeah. Or at least maybe.”
“But you don’t know who.”
“No. The only one I’m pretty sure about is you.”
She made another of those sounds that was almost a laugh. “Because I might have killed you. Thanks a lot.”
“So I think it’s time to get Debby out of here.”
“And you don’t want anybody to know where she goes. I’m afraid I can’t go along with that. I have to stay with her, and I have to let Walt Pomerlieu know where she is, too. If I don’t, I’ll not only lose my job, I might be lucky to stay out of jail.”
I finished my beer. Delish, as always. The God-as-a-brewer idea seemed likelier than ever. Did that mean that heaven was a pub? I’d read less likely descriptions.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, “and I may know how to keep everybody happy, more or less.”
“Start with me,” she said skeptically.
“All right, here’s the plan. Early in the morning, we all set out together to give Debby two days of island fun, doing one thing after another. When we’re away from the house, and a guy I know is up and about, I’ll borrow his car, which is a four-by-four with beach stickers. I’ll also borrow a couple of portable telephones and make arrangements for us to stay at a safe house for the next night or so. We keep one of the phones in the borrowed car and take the other one with us when we’re not in the car. You can keep in touch with Walt Pomerlieu by phone, and he can always get in touch with yo
u the same way, any time he wants to. But even though you two can communicate to your hearts’ content, he’ll never really know exactly where you are unless you tell him. Okay so far?”
“Go on.”
“Okay. While you’re reassuring him that everything’s fine, you won’t actually tell him your location. Instead, you’ll tell him stuff like, for instance, I’m taking you and Debby on a tour of the island, or I’m taking you for a nature walk up-island, in the Menemsha hills, maybe, or I’m taking you out on a fishing boat, or off to do some surf casting, or some such thing as that. But since you don’t know exactly where we’ll be, you can’t tell him that.”
“He won’t buy it!”
“Maybe not. But if he’s worried about little Debby, I’ll have her talk to him or to her folks whenever he wants. In fact, I think it’s a good idea to have her talk with Mom and Dad every day, so they don’t fret about her. She can tell Walt and her folks what she’s been doing and that she’s fine and having fun, and that they don’t need to be anxious. Of course we have to try to make sure that she is actually fine and having fun. I don’t need any grumpy Cricket Callahans on my hands.”
She didn’t like it very much. “The portable phones let us stay in touch without being located. And by using a borrowed car, we can move around without being spotted. And as long as nobody knows where we are, nobody can hurt Debby. Right?”
“You’re a fast thinker for a government employee. Debby can have a good time and be safe from Shadow while she’s doing it; Mom and Dad will be in touch with her whenever they want; you and your boss can talk whenever you want to, so he won’t have any reason to throw you in jail; and the good guys will have a couple of days to lay their hands on Shadow. It’s a perfect scheme.”
Well, not quite perfect, maybe. But, as they say, life is what happens when you plan something else.
— 18 —
About half past midnight, a car came down the driveway. As its lights came into the yard, I saw Karen outlined against them. Her hand was on her hip, under the tail of her shirt.
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