by Bob Mayer
Leaving the light in place, she crossed the hall and entered the master bedroom. This was the only room she had not been able to see from the outside. Neeley stared at the massive four poster bed against the far wall for a minute. The bed was made perfectly. Neeley bet that if she checked, the top sheet was upside down so the flowers would be right side up at the blanket fold. Her grandmother in France had taught her to make a bed like that and she imagined that Hannah had been taught the same.
Neeley moved to the nightstand and bugged the phone. That one would be good for both the phone and the room. All the bugs were voice activated so their batteries ought to work for at least two weeks given Hannah was alone. Neeley sincerely hoped it would take less than that to find John Masterson. Neeley had gloves on and the bugs were all sterile, so even if one was found, they couldn't be traced to her. Not that anyone could make anything sensible out of her fingerprints, Neeley thought with a bitter smile. That would certainly cause the police some consternation if they ever got a good print from her and ran it through their computers. Better not to ever have that little situation come up at all had been Gant's advice.
Neeley pulled a Polaroid out of her backpack and took a picture of the room. She tossed the developing film onto the bed. She then began to search. Every drawer she opened, she checked first to make sure there were no tell-tales to indicate it had been opened, such as a piece of hair taped across the bottom. She also took a picture of each as soon as it was open so that everything could be put back into place exactly as it had been left. The bedroom yielded no information about where John might possibly have gone. Using the Polaroids she returned the room and drawers to their original state.
Neeley retraced her steps out of the bedroom, down the hall and recovered the IR light. She had decided last night not to do the upstairs. She'd yet to see Hannah go up there.
Neeley went into the room that had obviously been John's den. She found the map in the back of the file drawer with the two red lines on it, but knew, as Hannah had, that no such pipelines had been built. Still she slid it into her backpack. The computer refused to allow her access as she didn’t have the password. Neeley decided her time was up.
Neeley scanned the rear of the house to the wood line before stepping out. All clear. She closed the door, relocked it and retrieved the special pliers. She quickly sprinted across the backyard and disappeared into the wood line about twenty feet in, near a tree she had scouted earlier. She pulled a square box, about six inches cubed, from the backpack.
Neeley climbed the tree until she was twenty feet above the ground. She taped the box in the crux of a branch, making sure it was secure. Then she pulled a spool of very thin wire from the top of the box and pinned the end to another branch about six feet above, leaving the exposed antenna hanging free. She flicked the box on and shimmied back down the tree. She knew it was chancy to leave it unattended, but she had no choice. There were too many things to do. She felt it was reasonably secure above the ground. The odds that someone would look up in that particular tree were slim.
Hannah's house taken care of, Neeley headed back to the truck.
***************
Hannah found a parking space despite it being Westport’s busiest time of the day. The complex consisted of various groupings of buildings—shops, office buildings and two Sheraton Hotels. As she made her way toward the building that housed Jenkins, Hannah suddenly realized she’d been here to see another doctor once—to have her wisdom teeth removed. That had been a bad experience; she remembered as she entered the lobby and walked to the elevator.
For some reason that memory brought to mind another one: her miscarriage, an ordeal she had believed at the time she would never recover from, if she ever had.
Standing alone in the elevator, Hannah was overwhelmed with the urge to cry. She held it in until she was afraid the pain in her chest would explode, sending fragments of her helter-skelter in the confined space. Finally, despite her efforts, it escaped.
That was the way Hannah entered Dr. Jenkins office, sobbing silently for a life lived uselessly and, more importantly, the one never lived at all.
The receptionist didn’t seem to think Hannah’s state unusual at all and simply waved her through to a partially opened door like a flagman on the highway trying to prevent a pile-up on her section of the road.
Hannah came to a stop just inside the door. She remembered being surprised the first time she’d met Jenkins that he didn’t look a thing like she had imagined from his voice. Jenkins was young and small, very inoffensive looking. The only immediate acknowledgement he made of her presence was to hand her a Kleenex and shut the door behind her.
As soon as they were both seated, he spoke. “You mentioned something about having problems with John?”
Right to the matter. Hannah liked that. It almost made up for his brief advice on the phone to follow her routine that had not worked well. She closed her eyes and thought for a moment how easy it would be to just sit here and have that voice explain everything. To tell all her secrets and then have them interpreted and fed back in a way she could handle. She’d told Jenkins a lot about herself over the last several years, but his feedback had been minimal. Since her life had been on a reasonably pleasant cruise control, Hannah had had no desire to press him for anything.
“He’s gone. I assume I drove him away.”
“You forced him to do what he did?”
“I know what you’re doing,” Hannah countered. “If I had been more aware I would have been able to do something prior to his leaving. Made things better somehow.”
“How do you know he wouldn’t have left no matter what you did?”
She looked at him and thought briefly about what he had just said. “Doctor Jenkins, I know you want to help me but I don’t think I can do this. I—“
“Did your husband say or do anything to you that indicated he was getting ready to leave you?”
She thought shrinks weren’t supposed to interrupt. “No.”
“Did he tell you he was unhappy?”
“No.”
Jenkins was matter of fact about it. “Sounds as if your husband made a conscious decision to leave and it might well have nothing to do with you. Why do you feel responsible?”
“He wouldn’t have left if he had been happy with me.”
“Were you happy with him?”
Touché, Hannah thought, but didn’t respond.
Jenkins shifted his angle of approach. “Tell me exactly what has happened since we last met.”
Hannah relayed the events, completely, for the first time to another person starting with waving bye to John as he headed off to golf. She wound up with the meeting with Brumley. It took her most of the allotted time for the session.
Jenkins had his hands folded neatly in his lap as he finally spoke, but through her own fog of emotions, Hannah was surprised to sense that Jenkins seemed nervous.
“Do you feel suicidal?”
“No.” Hannah remembered the knife and the tub. “Yes.”
A single eyebrow went up and Jenkins waited.
“I play with a knife sometimes.”
“Is this something new?”
“No.”
Jenkins waited, probably wondering why she’d never told him this before she knew. Finally he gave in. “Ever cut yourself when you play with the knife?”
“No.”
“Why do you do it?”
Finally the open-ended question, Hannah thought. She’d been a bit disappointed with Jenkins for a few moments there. “I think there’s a part of me that I want to get rid of.”
“And what part is that?”
Hannah shrugged. “The bad part.”
Jenkins was probably remembering that silence didn’t work well with her. “What do you think is the bad part of you?”
“The part that allowed me to end up in the situation I’m in right now. I should have known better.”
“Known better than what?”
“To entrust my life to someone else. It never worked as a child, I don’t know why I thought it would as an adult. I suppose I took the easy way and it’s turned out to be the hard way.”
“Other than that bad part, though, do you have a desire to hurt yourself?”
“No.”
“And if you get rid of that part of you?” Jenkins asked.
“Then I can control me.”
“And?”
Hannah’s eyes flashed with anger as she looked at Jenkins. “You don’t think I can control myself?”
Jenkins spread his hands wide, a giving up gesture. “That’s not my province. I think you have great un-tapped potential.”
She laughed bitterly. “Like a newly discovered oil field? That’s the area John worked in. Oil. They were always looking for the un-tapped potential.”
“You’re a person, not oil.”
Hannah’s narrowed her eyes and stared at Jenkins without saying anything. For the first time she really focused on him.
Jenkins shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “OK. Listen, Hannah. You’ve got to understand that you are under stress. There’s a lot going on in your head and in your gut right now. You’re feeling anger, guilt, relief, fear—every emotion in the book. And all within minutes of each other. Each emotion brings a new one on its coattails.
“There’s even a small part of you, and you don’t have to admit it to me if you don’t want to, that’s happy your husband is gone. Even the best marriage has its bad times.”
Hannah didn’t protest although she supposed it would have been normal to do so.
“The problem is that the feeling of relief probably immediately triggers a feeling of guilt,” Jenkins continued. “Guilt is the baggage women carry, while men wield anger.”
Not all women, Hannah immediately thought, but didn’t say. She didn’t feel guilty. She was shocked to suddenly realize it. Not in the slightest.
“Maybe—“ Jenkins drew the word out—“the part you’ve really wanted to cut out was your marriage. The life you were leading.”
That surprised Hannah. In all the years she’d been seeing him he’d never talked this much and had most certainly never taken a stand on anything. Jenkins eyes slid past her and she realized he was checking the time. “We can get together next week if you like.”
Hannah felt like there was a hole in her chest with cold air rushing through. Jenkins had said a lot in a very short period of time. The interesting thing was that none of it had particularly surprised her.
Jenkins slowly stood and walked over to the side of her chair, placing his hand on the back of it. She realized he was indicating that the time was up. She stood. “Thank you, Doctor.”
CHAPTER 8
The secretary's nameplate identified her as Lois Smith. She looked like the woman who sat behind the window at the DMV and administered those quick eye tests rather than Nero’s gatekeeper. She had a thick gray bun, reading glasses held around her neck by a thin black cord when not in use, and a bulky sweater of muted color covering the shapeless form of her body.
At the moment, Lois Smith was finding it difficult to maintain the mild indifference her job required. As Mr. Nero's personal secretary for over twenty-five years she was familiar with and personable to all his ‘employees’ and ‘contractors’. The exception was the man in front of her. He made her skin crawl. He could have been handsome but at some point he had let his inherent nature control his facial muscles to produce a haunting, feral quality. His head was completely bald, the lights gleaming off the white skin. He was tall and slender, but walked with a slight hunch, as if always protecting the front of his body from some undetermined blow.
Ms. Smith smiled with her lips tightly clenched. “Mister Nero is on the phone. Could you please take a seat, Mister Racine?”
Racine never did what a woman asked unless there was something to be gained from it. He remained standing, staring at her, enjoying her discomfort.
***************
Nero hung up the phone. The report from Doctor Jenkins in St. Louis was encouraging but he didn’t feel any excitement. It was as he had predicted. It would have surprised him if he’d been wrong at this stage. More pieces needed to be moved into place and then set in motion. One such piece was waiting outside his office right now. Reluctantly, Nero buzzed his secretary.
***************
Mrs. Smith nodded to the steel door behind her. "Mister Racine, Mister Nero will see you now."
Racine puckered his lips. To Ms. Smith's credit there was no outward reaction on her part. Accepting there would be none, Racine moved to the door and entered some numbers on the eye-level keypad, while Ms. Smith kept her finger pressed on the positive access button under her desktop that activated the keypad.
The door swung open and automatically shut behind him. Racine stood in a narrow hallway and started to walk to the door ahead. His footsteps activated the floor sensor and a somewhat female metallic voice filled the small enclosure.
"Identify please. Name, number and code. You have ten seconds." The voice went twenty decibels lower as it began the countdown.
Racine was in a hurry and the voice stopped at six. Racine didn't even bother to glance at the small portals that held the incapacitating gas should he fail to make the ten second countdown. He found it quite an irritating routine to go through.
A drawer slid open from the wall. "Deposit all weapons please."
Racine slid the pistol out of his shoulder holster and dropped it in the drawer. He carried a Desert Eagle, a massive gun made by the Israelis and chambered for .44 magnum cartridges. It made a solid thump as it hit the bottom of the drawer. He did the same with three knives from various hidden spots in his clothing along with the garrote secreted on the inside of his belt. He pushed and the drawer slid shut. A red light flashed and he knew a magnetic sensor was being activated. The light flashed green, then went red again, as a puff of wind from the grating below blew up and explosive, chemical and biological sensors in the ceiling sniffed the air. The light turned green and stayed that color.
"Proceed, please."
The far door slid apart and Racine entered Nero's office. He took the chair in front of the desk and waited. As long as he’d been coming here, the room had not changed, nor had Nero’s discourteous manner of greeting. The damn lights were pointed right at the seat and Racine took a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on.
Nero pulled a pack of cigarettes from his inside breast pocket and made a gesture of offering it to Racine. The pack was withdrawn before Racine had time to say no and Nero was inhaling before Racine could completely wipe the distaste from his face.
Racine waited and watched the old man smoke. When the ritual had ended, Nero capped the hole in his throat and reached for the voice box.
Nero's voice through the wand made the computerized one in the hallway sound like Greta Garbo. Racine took no notice of how the old man sounded. He was interested in only one thing: Why had he been sent for?
"I'm so pleased that you could make this appointment on such short notice, Mister Racine."
Racine felt a bead of sweat on the back of his neck slowly roll down. This place was always warm. Or was it the lights?
“I understand you visited Baltimore last week,” Nero said, his empty, scarred eye sockets staring over the desktop as if he could see into Racine’s soul.
Racine finally spoke and his voice was tenser and more rushed than he would have liked. "Look, Mister Nero, I'm sorry about what happened in Baltimore. Trust me. It was just bad luck. No harm, no foul, right?"
Nero straightened and continued turning the smoldering butt of his cigarette against the glass edge of his ashtray with his free hand. "Mister Racine, surely you can imagine my dilemma in trusting anyone, least of all you. It causes me concern when a government contractor does freelance work. It causes me to consider a possible conflict of interest.”
“But there’s no conflict, I--” Racine shut up after onl
y five words.
“Interesting,” Nero said. He shifted in his seat ever so slightly. “But we're not here to discuss the unfortunate incident in Baltimore."
Racine smiled with relief. "Mister Nero, it won't happen again."
Mr. Nero returned the wand to his throat. "Let's not push, Mister Racine. Let's agree that you have made your mistake for this year."
The younger man didn't bother to respond. He could see the fog of smoke wafting through the beams of light directed at him.
The metallic voice continued. "I've asked you here today because I have a new and delicate assignment that requires a man with your specialty."
Racine leaned forward. He waited through a thirty second tortuous coughing spasm until Nero could continue. "It seems we can no longer rely on the stability of Mister Anthony Gant's position. As a matter of fact, Mister Gant has truly retired. He's dead."
Racine couldn't hide his surprise. His immediate frustration at the display of emotion made him clench the arms of his chair. Even though Nero couldn’t see, Racine knew the man had an extraordinary ability to discern things in other ways.
"I know," Nero continued, "we are all shocked and saddened by Mister Gant's untimely demise, especially the circumstances. It appears he died a natural death, quite ironic if one takes into account the shocking rate of violence in his chosen profession."
"How do you know he’s dead?"
"Let's just ignore your impertinent question. Chalk it up to grief, yes? More importantly you should ask why you are here. I'm well aware of the animosity between you and the late Mister Gant, and even more so with his brother over the years."
"I'm sorry, sir, you're right. I must be overcome." Racine was making an extraordinary effort, for him at least, to control his voice and words.
Nero nodded his acceptance of the apology, ignoring the sarcasm of the second sentence. "Mister Gant's death potentially upsets a rather delicate balance of secrecy that has been maintained over the years. I myself feel the balance can be maintained but there are others, people in positions of importance, who feel that this should not be left to chance. They want what Gant has held all these years to maintain his end of the balance. We looked for the object in question. Mister Bailey paid a call and found a sterile cabin and a dead Mister Gant." Nero's voice broke and he took a long pause.