by Stuart Woods
Stone called Carpenter’s cell phone again.
“Yes?”
“Dino and I are at the Tower elevators, and hotel security has it roped off. If she comes down in one of the other elevators, we’ll stop her.”
“Good.”
“Now, you’re going to have to organize a search of every floor between you and the ground, knocking on every door and checking out every woman who even vaguely fits her description.”
“The FBI is already working on that,” she said.
“Dino has called his people off your offices and is bringing them here, but if Marie-Thérèse has already made the ground floor, they’re going to be too late to stop her. Our only chance is if she’s still somewhere upstairs.”
“We have a new description,” Carpenter said. “She’s wearing a pantsuit, color undetermined, and she has short blond hair and is carrying a large handbag.”
“Got it,” Stone said. “Call me with any news.” He hung up. “She’s now got short blond hair,” he said to Dino, “and she’s wearing a pantsuit.”
Marie-Thérèse found the elevator key, slipped it into the lock, and turned it. She looked up at the floor lights. The car was three floors above her and headed down. After a long moment, the door opened, and she pushed the cart aboard. She looked at the buttons on the control panel and discovered that the hotel had a basement and two subbasements. She inserted her key and pressed the basement button. The doors closed, and the car started down.
To her alarm, it stopped again almost immediately, and the doors opened. A busboy pushed a room-service cart aboard, but her cart was between him and the control panel. “Push SB-one for me, will you?” he asked.
She inserted her key again and pressed the button. The elevator began moving down again.
“Man, this day is a bitch,” the busboy said in Spanish-tinted English. “I got half a dozen carts to get downstairs, and somebody’s stopping me every two seconds.”
“Why are they stopping you?” she asked, alarmed.
“They’re looking for somebody upstairs,” he said, “some woman. That’s all I know. Security is all over the place, and there’s lots of other guys I don’t know, guys in suits.”
“I’m new here,” she said. “What’s in subbasements one and two?”
“Kitchen on SB-one, laundry on SB-two,” the man said. “Hey, I buy you a cup of coffee sometime in the lounge, okay?”
“Sure,” Marie-Thérèse said. She was starting to sweat under the two layers of clothing. And she was frightened.
58
Marie-Thérèse changed her mind and pushed the elevator button for SB-2.
“I thought you were getting off at the basement,” the busboy said.
“I meant to go to the laundry,” she said. “I got confused.”
“Yeah, it takes a while to learn your way around this place.” He got off at SB-1. “See you later.”
“Yeah, sure.” The door opened again at SB-2, and she pushed the cart out ahead of her. And there before her was something she had been looking desperately for: a sign saying exit, with an arrow pointing to her left. She pushed the cart in that direction, then followed another sign, turning down a long hallway. At the end was a door with an EXIT sign over it, but there was a uniformed, armed security guard standing in front of it. This shouldn’t be too difficult, she thought.
She pushed the cart nearly all the way to the door, then stopped and took her handbag from the hamper.
“I’m afraid you can’t get out this way, lady,” the guard said. “I got orders.”
She adopted the Spanish accent of the busboy. “Oh, I just want to have a cigarette outside,” she said. “They give you a hard time if you smoke inside.” She rummaged in her handbag, as if she were looking for her cigarettes.
“Yeah, I’m a smoker, too, so I know how it is, but I still can’t let you out this door. It’s orders from upstairs.” He rested a hand nonchalantly on the butt of his pistol.
Marie-Thérèse stopped rummaging in her bag. If she tried to shoot him, he’d have a head start. “Oh, well,” she said, “I’d better get back to work. I can have my smoke later.” She turned the cart around and pushed it back the way she had come, looking for another way out. She found another exit, but there was another security guard standing in front of it, and he looked less friendly than the last one. Finally, with nowhere else to go, she went back to the elevator, put her key into the lock, and pressed the button. She’d try another floor.
Carpenter showed her ID to the guard and took the express elevator to the lobby. As she stepped out, Stone and Dino approached.
“She hasn’t come this way,” Stone said. “How’s the search upstairs going?”
“Slowly,” Carpenter replied. “She could have knocked on the door of any room and got herself inside, and it’s a big hotel.”
“Dino,” Stone said, “if you can get a cop or two to watch the elevators, we could work our way up.”
Dino spoke into his radio, and a moment later, two uniformed officers approached. Dino gave them instructions, then turned to Carpenter. “Okay, let’s go upstairs.”
“We’ll take the other elevator, to the lower floors,” Carpenter said, “and just do a sweep of each floor. We won’t knock on every door. We’ll leave that to the search teams and just hope to get lucky.”
Stone and Dino followed her onto an elevator and rode up a floor. They got off and began walking the halls.
Marie-Thérèse got off at the basement level; at least it was closer to the street. But to her surprise, the floor contained staff offices for the hotel. A securty guard down the hallway spotted her and began walking toward her. Quickly, she got back onto the elevator, hoping he didn’t have a key. The ground floor would be crawling with cops, so she pressed three. At least she could walk down quickly from that level.
Carpenter and her two companions completed their patrol of the second floor, and she started toward the stairs.
“No,” Dino said. “If we get into the stairwell, we won’t be able to get out on another floor; we’ll have to walk downstairs, and we just came from there. We’ll have to take the elevator.” He pressed the call button.
“Do you really think she’s still in the hotel?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” Carpenter replied, “but it’s the only place we’ve got to look for her at the moment. If she got out of the hotel, she could be anywhere.”
“Let’s just keep at it,” Dino said. “It’s called police work, Stone, remember?”
“I remember,” Stone said. They got on the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.
Marie-Thérèse got off on the third floor, pushing the cart ahead of her, her handbag back in the hamper. She rounded a corner, looking for an exit, in time to see two men and a woman get off the elevator. They turned and began to walk toward her. She recognized them immediately and fought the urge to run. “Good morning,” she said in her Spanish accent, as they passed her.
“Good morning,” the three muttered.
They had gone a dozen steps when Carpenter held up a hand to stop them. A gun was suddenly in her hand, and she held the barrel to her lips. Silently, she pointed the weapon at the maid disappearing down the hallway.
Stone and Dino turned to look at the woman. From under her white uniform skirt, a black pant leg had fallen to her ankle.
“Pantsuit,” Carpenter whispered.
Stone and Dino drew their weapons.
59
Marie-Thérèse knew she had been made. She had the maid’s passkey in her hand, and, crouching behind the cart, she grabbed her handbag from the hamper and opened the door to the room nearest her, ducked inside, and slammed the door behind her.
A man emerged from the bathroom. He was enormous—six and a half feet tall, three hundred pounds, she estimated. He was dressed in trousers and a white shirt, and a necktie hung loose at his neck. “Yeah?” he asked.
She dug into her handbag and came out with the pistol. �
�Stand over there,” she said.
“What the fuck is going on here?” he demanded.
Marie-Thérèse tossed her maid’s cap on the unmade bed and began unbuttoning the uniform dress. “You look like you once played football.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Ever have a knee injury?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how much it hurt?”
“Yeah.”
She pointed the pistol at his right knee. “This is going to hurt a lot more,” she said.
He held his hands out in front of him in a pacifying motion. “Okay, okay, whatever you say.”
Marie-Thérèse walked to the window, keeping the gun pointed at him, and looked out. She was only three floors above street level, and she had thoughts of tying the bedsheets together, but there were two police cars parked in the street, their lights flashing. She turned back to her captive.
“Just tell me what you want,” he said.
“I want a ride out of here,” she replied.
Stone, Dino, and Carpenter stood in the hallway, their backs against the wall, on either side of the door.
“Kick it in,” Carpenter said. “That’s what cops do, isn’t it?”
“That kind of door don’t kick,” Dino said, “unless you want to break an ankle.” He put the handheld radio to his mouth. “This is Bacchetti. We’ve got the suspect cornered in a room on the third floor. I want a SWAT team with a battering ram up here now.”
“Lieutenant, it’s Sergeant Rivera,” a voice came back. “We don’t have a SWAT team on site—you didn’t ask for one earlier. I’ll have to call it in, so it’s going to be a few minutes.”
“She isn’t going anywhere,” Stone said.
“Okay,” Dino said into the radio, “tell them to shake their asses.”
“What do we do now?” Carpenter asked.
“Let me see if I can talk her out,” Stone said.
“Feel free,” Dino replied.
Stone moved closer to the door and rapped on it sharply. “Marie-Thérèse, it’s Stone Barrington.”
“Well, hi there, Stone,” her muffled voice came back. “What brings you to see me?”
“I want to get you out of here alive,” Stone said.
“Sounds good to me. How do we go about that?”
“It’s simple. You open the door, toss out your weapon, and walk out with your hands on your head. I guarantee you’ll be safe.”
“Carpenter’s out there, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she’s here.”
“Can you guarantee I’ll be safe from her? After the lie about the money transfer, I don’t trust her.”
“I sent the money!” Carpenter shouted. “It’s in your account!”
Stone motioned for her to be quiet. “Carpenter is not going to shoot you, but a SWAT team is on the way, and unless we get you out of there now, they’re going to be battering the door down, and anything could happen.”
“Well, we don’t want that, do we? All right, I’m coming out. Everybody stand away from the door.”
The three of them backed across the hallway and waited.
“We’re out of the way,” Stone said.
“Okay, here I come.”
The knob turned, and the door swung inward.
Stone blinked. A man stood there, a man so big that he filled the whole doorway. His fingers were interlaced across his belly, and from under his arms protruded two female feet, in heels. Marie-Thérèse peeked over his shoulder, an arm around his neck, and her pistol was against his temple.
“Giddyup,” she said, “but take it slow.”
The man moved slowly through the doorway.
“Just don’t turn your back on them,” Marie-Thérèse said.
Dino spoke up. “Hey, I know you, don’t I?” he said to the man. “Weren’t you a linebacker for the Jets a while back?”
“Yeah,” the man replied.
“Billy Franco, The Freezer!”
“Yeah, right, now could you just please do whatever it takes to get this lady offa my back and outa my life?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt this sports chat,” Marie-Thérèse said, “but we’re going to do a little dance now. Everybody is going to rotate counterclockwise until we’ve changed places.”
The three began moving in that direction, and Franco moved at the same time, until his back was to the opposite wall, and they were standing in the doorway of the room.
“Now, everybody back into the room and close the door, and then I won’t have to splash Mr. Freezer’s brains all over the place.”
“Then what?” Franco asked.
“Then I’m going to ride you out of this hotel and into the nearest car.”
“I got a better idea,” Franco said.
“What?”
He took a quick step backward and slammed Marie-Thérèse against the wall, then dove sideways.
Marie-Thérèse made a sound like air rushing from a blown tire and ended up in a sitting position on the floor. Then, with the last of her strength, she raised the pistol, pointed it in the general direction of the three, and pulled the trigger. There was a soft click as the hammer fell on the empty chamber.
For a moment, no one moved, then Carpenter fired two bullets into Marie-Thérèse.
Stone swung an arm, knocking Carpenter off her feet. “Stop it!” he yelled.
Franco, who had been lying facedown in the hallway, his hands covering his head, turned and looked. “Did somebody get shot?” he asked.
Stone bent over Marie-Thérèse and held his fingers to her throat. “Yes,” he said. “Shot dead.”
60
Stone got back to his house around noon. There was a courier package on his doorstep, and he took it inside and dumped it on the hall table. He was exhausted and dispirited, and he was in no mood to read anything. What he needed was sleep.
He left a trail of clothing from the elevator to the bedroom and climbed into bed, pausing only to press the privacy button on his telephone.
When he awoke it was dark outside. The bedside clock said just after eight. He got his feet on the floor, stood up, and walked to the bathroom. Five minutes of hot shower on the back of his neck made him feel nearly human again.
He went back into the bedroom, thinking of food. He hadn’t had anything to eat since the night before. He switched off the privacy button on the phone, and it rang immediately.
“It’s Dino. Get your ass up to Elaine’s.”
“I don’t know, Dino. I just woke up.”
“Carpenter’s leaving. She tried to call you, but I guess you had the phone turned off. She’s stopping by on her way to the airport.”
“All right, I’ll be there.” He hung up, then shaved and got into some clean clothes, still a little fuzzy around the edges. As he was about to leave the house, his eye fell on the package on his front hall table. The return address was the Carlyle hotel. He opened it. Inside were several sheets of paper and a fairly thick envelope.
Stone:
I have the very odd feeling that I am at the end of something, maybe of everything. I wish I could stop, but I can’t, not until I’ve done what I set out to do. I know you think I’m a fool, and you had me convinced of that, until I was faced with the duplicity of the people I oppose. If things go well, I will probably be out of the country by the time you read this. If things go wrong, as I fear they might, then you have your instructions. I have enclosed the name of my lawyer in Zurich. When he is notified, he will know what to do. I wish to be cremated and have my ashes sent to him. Thank you for what you tried to do.
Marie-Thérèse
Stone looked at the attached document, which was neatly typed and notarized. It authorized him to act as her attorney in the United States, before and after her death. Another sheet of paper was a copy of a letter to her Zurich attorney, apprising him of Stone’s involvement in her affairs. He ripped open the envelope to find a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, the same as the last time she had paid him. He toss
ed the package onto the table, left the house, and looked for a cab.
Dino was alone when Stone arrived. He sat down, and without a word, Dino shoved a copy of the New York Post across the table, open to a story inside.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL
MURDERED AT WALDORF
Jeffrey Purdue, a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, was found shot to death in a suite in the Waldorf Towers this morning. Police sources said that he had picked up Darlene King, a high-priced prostitute, the evening before and had taken her to his suite, and that, after a night together, she had robbed and murdered him.
A maid discovered the body early in the morning and notified police and hotel security. The hotel was locked down and a search conducted, resulting in a confrontation between Ms. King and police. When she pointed a pistol at them, she was shot to death.
“That’s it?” Stone asked. “No reference to what happened at the Four Seasons or to Mason?”
“It’s the clean version,” Dino said. “Only Purdue gets his name in the papers.” Dino threw up his hands. “Don’t look at me. This came from a lot higher up the food chain.”
“Speaking of food,” Stone said, reaching for a menu. A waiter set down a Wild Turkey on the rocks. “Want to share the porterhouse for two?”
“Why not?” Dino said. “I haven’t eaten. Mary Ann is at her father’s.”
“The porterhouse, medium to medium rare,” Stone said to the waiter.
“Make that rare,” Dino said.
“Make it rare on his side,” Stone countered, and the waiter went away.
Carpenter suddenly appeared, looking businesslike in a suit. She sat down.
“Drink? Dinner?” Dino asked.
“Neither. I’ll eat on the airplane.”
“There’s a flight to London this time of night?” Stone asked.