“It’s one of our finest. One of the finest we’ve ever had in stock, really.”
This morning they had made the rounds. A dozen different jewelers. Countless rings. A mine of diamonds. Megan had been like a child in a candy store. She found herself filled with a giddiness that made her feel slightly embarrassed. But what could she do? Every girl’s fantasy was to spend a day as she had today. Olin simply let her wander the display cases, offering encouraging words. The prices were outlandish. But he seemed only to care that she find precisely the one jewel that she could not do without.
At Tiffany’s she tried on dozens, oohing and aahing and enjoying herself immensely, though never arriving at the stone that truly met her expectations. Manhattan, as a whole, was a shopper’s paradise. And Megan wallowed in it.
Around noon they broke for lunch, dining on crab salad and a delicious white wine. Megan merely picked at her meal, her thoughts still floating across acres of crushed velvet. The wine helped her nerves. She sipped it and clung to Olin’s arm.
Money was never a topic of discussion. Olin wouldn’t hear of it. If she questioned him about a steep price, he’d simply touch a finger to her lips and convince her that the only issue of concern was her complete satisfaction, not price.
So now she stood at the counter, bathed in milky light, transfixed. She set the ring at the edge of the crushed velvet display pad and made a disciplined effort to peruse the rest of the selection. But Olin could almost read her thoughts. She’d found the one, he knew.
A clear anxiety filled her as she drummed her fingers along the top of the glass counter.
“They’re all so gorgeous.”
“Absolutely,” the saleswoman echoed.
Olin waited, watching. Another couple shopped a few feet away. As if drawn by some unseen force, Megan steered back to her place at Olin’s side, nearly floating on air.
“You were born to wear that piece,” the saleswoman continued, sensing the sale but doing everything in her power not to appear too anxious.
“What do you think?” Olin knew the answer.
Megan had the ring on her finger, once again adjusting the angle in the light. She turned and looked at him with tears in her eyes. “This is the one.”
In many ways, their relationship was, however intense and passionate, still in its infancy. There had been no time for the newness to wear off. They had known each other barely nine months, and had been separated for weeks at a time, communicating either by phone or by email. And when they managed to find time to be together, it was usually spent in bed, not in extended conversation.
By nature, Olin St. John was self-contained, disciplined, remote, introverted. He was cool and in control at all times, whereas Megan’s energy was on display. She was not hyper butalive. That appealed to him. He was warmed by her glow.
Megan had left the States at the age of twelve, under circumstances she’d been too young to understand. She’d known only that her mother and father had stopped loving each other and that her mother had decided it might be best for Megan and herself to begin a new life in Europe. Her mother married a man from Italy named Durant, and now lived with him in Rome. Megan had been relinquished to a Catholic school in London, where she spent much of the next six years under the tutelage of a host of nuns at the Church of the Holy Trinity, including Sister Catina. It was a lonely way to grow up. Sister Catina had taken her under her wing, helping her with her studies and encouraging her in her art. Now the old nun was near death’s door, a fact that without Olin’s presence in her life would have been a devastating reality to face alone. Her mother had little to do with her, ignoring her periodic letters and calls. Her new husband was a success of some sort. Megan remembered little or nothing of life before Europe. Her father was gone so much of the time when she was small that not having him around somehow felt normal. And given that he apparently hadn’t made an attempt to contact them during their years in Europe, she had never felt the need to take steps to fill that vacancy. Clearly, he’d not come after her, so why bother?
She had her art studies to fulfill her and she had Olin to love. She had a glorious diamond ring on her finger, and the promise of a fairy-tale life awaiting her across the Atlantic. She asked nothing of the past, except that it stay behind her. Her vision of the life ahead was idyllic, blissful.
Olin did not have the luxury of dismissing his past so offhandedly. His past had fangs and wings, and thrived on fear—his fear. A childhood in the streets had taught him to survive by way of the gun and the blade. Both his parents were long dead. Megan’s innocence was another thing that he relished. To her, everything was a delight. She possessed a freshness, an optimism as yet unscathed by a crass and odious world. And perhaps his money and his love and worldly ways could protect her from it. It would be his mission to build a wall around her innocence. Long ago he’d lost count of how many men he had killed, but he would kill a thousand more in her honor if she demanded it. She was his one solitary hope of surviving a world that had made him what he was. Megan was a beacon on a hill, a point of reference on a rolling, thrashing sea. He could not, would not, under any conceivable circumstance, give her up.
As they moved casually along, Olin put his face in her hair, breathing in the sweet perfume. She turned her face to him, kissing him full on the mouth. How had he lived without her? How had she lived without him? He hooked an arm around her, bringing her in close against him as they walked. With the afternoon came an increase in the snowfall. The wind picked up, but neither of them noticed or paid the weather any heed. They sauntered through a splendid museum, and later stopped in at a quaint bistro for coffee. In the bistro, they stole to a corner table and made out like a couple of teenagers, flirting and giggling, sipping expensive coffee and ignoring the world around them. Later, over an early dinner, they whispered conspiratorially in a darkened booth, lost in each other’s eyes.
The day was a dizzying contest to catch up on lost time.
18
LESS THAN AN HOUR EARLIER THE CITY HAD SEEMED TOshrink simply on the basis of Louis Vena’s testimony. Their conversation had sounded so profitable. Vena was so matter-of-fact. But now, standing at the first of three destinations Vena claimed to have stopped at on Monday evening, Joel slowly came to the realization that the real work, the real hunt, had only just begun. Suddenly, Vena’s recollections appeared brutally detail deficient.
Panic began to flower in his chest. He’d burned two full days already, with no assurance that Megan was even still in New York. His window of opportunity, however broad it might have been to begin with, was creeping shut with every passing moment. The stress was claustrophobic, like cold damp hands around his throat.
Joel came out of a deli a half a block from the intersection of East Fifty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue, taking a big bite from a meatball sandwich wrapped in wax paper. He paused on the cement steps as the door eased shut behind him. He’d considered taking the time to find a table inside and take a load off his feet while he ate his sandwich, but thought better of the idea in light of the ticking clock. Rush hour had arrived. The congested streets and sidewalks of Manhattan would surely not help. From a pocket of his coat he removed a Discover Card envelope, folded in thirds. He unfolded it and saw the crude map Vena had sketched in red ink. Vena had come down Lexington and then turned left onto East Fifty-seventh Street. His recollection had been fuzzy, too fuzzy for Joel’s comfort, but he swore he’d made a drop in front of a large apartment building, an apartment of either limestone or gray cinder, he was almost certain.
Joel followed Vena’s directions, dodging foot traffic as he looked from the envelope to street signs to the walls on either side of him. Suddenly, he found himself in front of what must be the right building. It was a nine-story cinder blockL . He stood staring up at it. This had to be it, he thought. Looking up from across the street, at the building, Joel started to count the windows, but stopped himself. There had to be a couple hundred on this side alone.
“How many hundreds of people live there?” he wondered aloud, shaking his head in disgust and disbelief. From the outside the apartment didn’t appear run-down. On the contrary, it looked like a nice middle-income residence, which meant he’d likely either have to be buzzed in by a resident or get by a doorman in order to get inside. And even if he got in, what then?
If the apartment were her home, if there was some means by which he could nail that down as fact, time wouldn’t be a crucial factor. Otherwise, the clock was the enemy. If Vena could have definitively stated that Megan was a fare that night, and that he’d delivered her to this apartment building, Joel could have had some room to play with his strategy. But as it was, this was just the first of three stops, and the more time he wasted at one, the more likely it was he’d miss her somewhere else. The point of pain was radiating outward, pounding through his head in rhythm with his pulse. He patted his pockets, hoping to find a small bottle of Excedrin, remembering then that he’d left it in his briefcase in his room.
He was having to think on his feet—always a bad way to lay out a plan of action. There were no good answers, no good options. If he managed to gain entry into the building, a door-to-door canvassing would likely get him quickly booted to the curb. And loitering outside, simply waiting for her to make an appearance, would burn precious time.
He stood on the curb across the street from the building, his eyes moving from window to window. Lights were on in many, though not all, of the apartments. She could be in any one of them, he thought. Or none at all. She might be somewhere on the other end of the city, or in New Jersey, or Connecticut…or just about anywhere on earth. He’d seen her forty-eight hours ago. In fewer than forty-eight hours, a person could easily get from New York to Moscow.
I might as well be looking in another country.
Standing there staring at the nine-story structure was useless. He needed to move on. Glancing both ways repeatedly, he dashed across the lanes of traffic. Again he found himself being brushed on all sides by fellow pedestrians, most of whom were probably heading home after a long day at work. He sidestepped his way among moving bodies until he found himself pressed against the hedge that separated the apartment building from the sidewalk. Up close, the place seemed even more immense. Surely he’d never find her in there. It was time to move on.
Joel turned to go, then paused. He took a step closer to the building, reaching a hand through the hedge, hesitantly pressing the flat of his hand to the brick facade. For a long moment the cold and the wind and the frustration eased away. In that instant his only desire was to reach out to his daughter. As desperate a gesture as it was, desperation was all he had.
He was a generic-looking government worker with a blond comb-over, and glasses nearly thick enough to be bulletproof. He did his best to make eye contact with absolutely no one in the world. His office was located among innumerable others within the walls of a massive government complex that was itself a part of the web of office structures in and around the D.C. area.
His official title was lame and interchangeable with any other in the building. It was stamped onto a nameplate that stood at the edge of his cheap desk. Apart from his everyday responsibilities, this man was also the liaison for a very “unofficial” government agency.
Today he forged an erratic route through the city in his gray sedan. If anyone had been following him, they were by now pissed off and thoroughly lost.
Finally, at a supermarket, he parked near a chain-link fence, locked his door, and crossed the parking lot on foot. By taxi he traveled four miles, walked another three blocks, periodically throwing a cautious eye over his shoulder, then flagged a second cab. The cab dropped him at a corner where he waited less than five minutes and caught a city bus. At the third stop, he spotted his contact out the window. His contact wore a Red Sox ball cap, as specified. Comb-over and Red Sox climbed in the emerald green Mercury Marquis, without a word between them.
The Mercury Marquis stopped at a private airfield where the man with the comb-over boarded a Bell 430 helicopter. Thirty-seven minutes later, the Bell 430 touched down on a helipad inside a guarded 500-acre estate. The estate was surrounded by dense timber on all sides. The helipad faced a huge mansion built of white stone that had been imported from a quarry in Afghanistan. The rotors from the Bell whipped up the snow on and around the pad. He could see faces waiting for him from a stone terrace. Opening the door of the chopper, he raised an arm across his face to block the wind coming from the rotors.
Hurrying toward the warmth of the mansion, he glanced up at the terrace at the men awaiting him.
H. Glen Shelby was the first to shake the liaison’s hand.
“Mr. Susnick,” Shelby said.
Susnick was not his real name. No one here cared what his real name was. They didn’t need to know about him, only what he was here to tell them.
None of those present here, except for Susnick himself, were government employees. Shelby was retained by the president on a private basis. Susnick recognized his face from television. The remaining two men he’d never seen before, but he had some idea who they might be.
The old man frowning from his wheelchair owned the property on which they stood. It was his mansion, and it was his Bell 430 that had brought Susnick here. His name was Albertwood. The other man was Eamon Desmond, here as representative for another party that held a very strong interest in the information Susnick had come to deliver.
Susnick’s coat was taken by a stunning Puerto Rican maid, and he was ushered down a wide hall with a marble floor and a massive, vaulted ceiling. Susnick wiped the lenses of his glasses on his shirt, squinting to see where he was walking. Everyone seemed very interested in his metal briefcase. And well they should be, he thought.
They went to a room that was furnished with a beautiful, long conference table. Susnick was offered a seat, which he declined. After the winding journey he’d taken to get there, he was plenty happy to stand. He set the briefcase on the table and opened it, rifling through its contents.
Shelby was not familiar with Susnick but had little doubt that the man had been exposed to all levels of classified information over the course of his career. He was one of the faceless subordinates who served as messengers for those who could have no “official” contact with the people paying for the information being delivered. Shelby didn’t know from where in the D.C. area Susnick had crawled out of; only that whatever he had to offer had come from deep inside the Pentagon.
Susnick eyed each of the three men who flanked him. He was beginning to bear the look of a man who knew too much and was not important enough to actively protect. He knew his days were numbered. Someone would find him in an alley one day, or in a runoff ditch in some rural county, gutted and bled out. It was difficult to retire from the intelligence racket.
Shelby was there on behalf of the president, because the chief executive couldn’t have firsthand knowledge of these matters but had to make sure nonetheless that they were handled promptly and efficiently. Desmond was there on like terms. Albertwood had brought all the parties together. There was as much pressure on him in these matters as on anyone else.
Clifton Yates had informed Shelby of the email message to Ettinger’s brother only this morning. Yet now, barely fifteen hours later, Shelby was here, hoping that a possible solution had been discovered. The predawn excursion with the president had left him at the edge of his nerves. Yates was rattled, understandably. If Ettinger had pulled something, they had to know exactly what it was and stop it. That’s why Susnick was there.
The old man in the wheelchair, Julius Albertwood, glared up with wide eyes and a gnarled grin, his only expression. His entire right side was paralyzed. Albertwood was ninety. His body had essentially given out on him, but the old man’s mind was still as sharp as a knife and twice as deadly. Over the years, the skin of his face had constricted, pulling his lips back from his teeth. This left him with a nasty, perpetual grin. It was startling, to say the least. He used his good
hand—the left one—to work the steering wand on the arm of the wheelchair. He backed away from where he’d wheeled up to the table, and parked himself at the corner of the table, as close to Susnick and his briefcase as he could manage.
Shelby did not bother with introductions. Susnick did not wait for permission to speak. From his briefcase he removed three glossy eight-by-ten photographs, each in black and white. He spread them on the table in front of his small audience.
“Those are still-frame photographs taken from a security camera in the vice president’s residence in Maine,” Susnick said without looking up.
“Beagle Run,” Shelby added.
“Yes. The camera is mounted in a short hallway leading to the kitchen area of the lodge. The Ettingers have a slew of such devices mounted throughout their homes, both here and abroad. These cameras are monitored by satellite at an off-site location. They have a long-running contract with a security outfit in Maryland. This outfit also does contract work for the Pentagon.” Susnick glanced over the top of his glasses, his hands still busy in the briefcase, and added, “Convenient, I know. This permits us special…access.”
The photos were black and white, and rather grainy, and no one had any question who the subject captured on film was. The photos were captured images of the vice president taken from digital video footage. These three shots showed a progression of movement, and the time-and-date stamp and the bottom of the photos indicated the time lapse between the three shots to be fifteen seconds.
Susnick noted, “The cameras relay an image to the satellite every five seconds, twenty-four hours a day.”
“Why five seconds instead of a continuous feed?” Desmond asked.
“Storage considerations.”
Desmond folded his arms over his chest, a frown on his face.
“These images,” Susnick continued, “show James Ettinger at sixA .M. on the seventeenth of December.”
The Greater Good Page 9