The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  “Could you see a face?” Desmond yelled.

  “No. No. The view was pretty obscured. But the small glimpse I got looked like a man,” Lewis remarked.

  Peel!Desmond screamed in his own head. But could he be sure?

  “Echo-Three, do you have a visual?” Desmond said.

  “Affirmative,” Carmichael said. “Silver Infiniti has just passed my position, and I am pursuing.”

  “I’m on my way,” Desmond said. “Echo-Four, maintain your position. Keep watch while we check this guy out.”

  Lewis raised his arm to the tree and rested his forehead against his hand. Desmond was leaving him out there to freeze to death. His toes and fingers were numb, and it wasn’t going to get any better. A gust of wind ripped through the trees, dumping clumps of snow on his shoulders and down the neck of his coat. His nose felt like wood. He hated Desmond. And he hated Stott.

  Carmichael maintained a safe distance behind the Infiniti. She updated Desmond on her position, and within a few minutes she saw their headlights appear in her rearview mirror.

  “Don’t spook him,” Desmond’s voice said over her radio. “Let him lead us to her.”

  “Roger that,” Carmichael said.

  A new spark of life shot through Desmond. He focused his eyes dead ahead. If itwas Jefferson Peel in that car, where else would he be going alone at 12:30A .M. on a Saturday morning? Had Brooke Weaver managed to contact him? If so, where from and how? Had she indeed flown into O’Hare? How else could she have made it into Chicago so quickly? It seemed impossible.

  But where else would he be going? They were already seven miles from his home and heading onto US 41, which was also Lake Shore Drive. He hadn’t gotten out for a simple errand. He wasn’t after milk or eggs or batteries for the television remote control. He was driving with a purpose. He was going to meet the girl.

  And they had him in their sights.

  Desmond smiled to himself.Finally, he thought. Finally they had her. And better yet, they would nab the two of them at once. That was a lovely thought. Desmond squeezed his fingers around the steering wheel. Mr. Stott had entrusted him with much responsibility. And here he was, finally, coming through the ordeal victorious. Mr. Stott would reward him greatly. That was Stott’s way, to punish severely when it was called for, and to reward generously for a job very well done.

  Fanciful notions danced in his head. What might Mr. Stott offer him as compensation for salvaging the consortium in the face of certain disaster? A villa in Greece, perhaps? His own office in Hong Kong? Perhaps a Lamborghini, or a few million dollars in a Swiss account? Or perhaps he’d be given his choice from all the above. Ah, yes! He’d given so many years of his life in service to Stott, and it was time for those years to be handsomely rewarded. Suddenly hot with adrenaline and anticipation, Desmond pressed the gas pedal, goosing the Yukon into the left lane, swishing past the Toyota Camry. Carmichael watched him pass.Better you than me, she thought.

  Desmond keyed his handheld radio. “Echo-Two, do you read me?”

  Static crackled for a few seconds, then Porter answered, “Roger that.”

  “We need you airborne, Echo-Two.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Follow Interstate Ninety southeast from O’Hare, until you reach Highway Forty. You should be on top of us by then. The rabbit is running.”

  “Roger. Echo-Two out.”

  Porter had exited the terminal area and now walked quickly across the windblown tarmac. The general aviation section of O’Hare was packed with privately owned and leased hangars. Most of the hangars housed fixed-wing aircraft. Some of the aircraft were staged outside the hangar doors, likely due to space restrictions, though a few were in the process of preparing for flights tonight. He’d seen a few helicopters staged outside a hangar as they had descended in the Lear.

  He reached the hangar and saw only one chopper, a red and yellow Enstrom, sitting out on the tarmac. A man in grease-stained work coveralls shut the engine cowling and walked toward the side door of the hangar. Porter stole behind the corner of the sheet-metal building, and waited.

  After a minute or two, a mechanic wearing coveralls appeared at the door, followed by the pilot, dressed in a heavy down vest and a baseball cap. They talked hurriedly, all the while pointing at the helicopter. Then they shook hands, and Porter heard the mechanic wish the pilot a good flight. The mechanic disappeared inside and shut the door behind him. The pilot headed for his machine.

  There was a sharp northerly wind slicing across the airfield. The pilot opened the Enstrom’s right-side door and paused, patting his vest for a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t hear the footsteps approaching. The suppressor on the barrel of the Glock touched just behind his right ear, but he saw and heard nothing. He was dead before even a single thought had time to formulate in his brain.

  Porter caught the man under the arms and hefted him into the rear seat of the Enstrom. The bird was fueled and ready to go. Porter couldn’t have asked for more. Where this nut had been heading at this hour of the morning, Porter could only imagine, but he’d clearly been anxious to get the machine in the air. Porter buckled in, and within seconds the rotors were buzzing overhead. The machine lifted off the ground, and he headed southeast, as instructed.

  55

  THEINFINITI SLOWED, SIGNALED LEFT AT ATIN THE ROAD,and headed down into the parking area of the marina. Its taillights blinked in the shifting fog as the luxury car eased over a series of speed bumps.

  Desmond nearly wet his pants. Peel was heading toward the water. They couldn’t get too close, not yet. The marina was quiet and dark except for a few lampposts that lined the parking area and dotted the mooring docks. They turned left at theT . The other car momentarily slipped out of sight behind a red brick structure, then flickered back into view, farther down the slope near the dock.

  A question buzzed through Desmond’s mind: was the girl here at the marina, or would he have to travel by water to meet her? If the girl was nearby, it would make easy work of disposing their bodies.

  He radioed Carmichael, and they parked near each other along the outside perimeter of the parking area. He then radioed Porter, updating their location. Porter had found a laminated folding map of Illinois and quickly plotted his flight path to the marina. He’d be there in a matter of minutes.

  Desmond nudged his door shut and motioned for Carmichael to follow him. They each carried 9mm Berettas. Except for the lampposts along its perimeter, the sloping parking area was dark. They came upon the parked Infiniti sedan. Its lights were off and it was abandoned.

  The dark silhouette of a lone figure was walking hastily toward the dock. Even from this distance and in the dark, they could tell by the posture, size, and gait that it was male. Desmond was nearly salivating. Water lapped against the pilings beneath the dock, and against the boats themselves.

  It wasn’t a poor-man’s dock, Desmond noted. These were yachts. Millions of dollars bobbing on the water. Fiberglass and wood and brass. Rich boys’ toys.

  The silhouetted figure stopped suddenly near a branch of the dock, and appeared to turn their way. Desmond yanked Carmichael by the arm, pulling her into the shadows. Had he seen them? There was no way to be sure. If they spooked him now, he might bolt, and then things might get complicated. But Peel hesitated for only a moment, then returned to his business.

  He branched off to the right, disappearing between two vessels whose well-polished hulls stood proudly out of the water. A light winked on in the cabin of one of the boats. Desmond motioned for Carmichael to hold tight, and then he crossed to the far side of the walk for a better look.

  The growl of a motor starting split the stillness of the night. Desmond looked suddenly frantic. He could hear the distinct sound of a propeller gurgling just beneath the surface of the water. Floodlights shone down on the dock. Desmond was careful to stay out of the light. The motor revved.

  His radio crackled. “Do you see him?” It was Carmichael’s voice.

  “No.”<
br />
  The motor engaged, and suddenly the cabin cruiser began to ease away from its slip. Desmond sprinted across the wooden planks, but the boat moved too quickly. By the time he’d reached the water’s edge, the boat was out of reach. Carmichael approached at a hurried jog, her cheeks and nose rosy from the cold.

  Desmond whipped out his radio. “Echo-Two, you read?”

  “Roger, Echo-One, I hear you,” Porter said.

  The boat was pushing into deeper waters, quickly throttling up, and getting smaller by the second. If they didn’t act fast, they’d lose him in the night. Shifting pillars of fog coasted across the water.

  A stiff gust rustled the collar of Desmond’s coat. “The rabbit is on the water. He’s heading hard east. Can you find Fontane Marina?”

  The Enstrom helicopter was still flying over the mainland. Porter flicked on an overhead light and grabbed for the laminated map. “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he said, stabbing the map with his index finger.

  “He’s in what looks like a thirty-foot cabin cruiser of some kind,” Desmond said as the warning lights on the boat faded farther from view. “Right now he’s maybe a quarter mile from shore, heading east.”

  “Roger.”

  The Enstrom blew out over the water, and Porter banked to the southeast. He dropped in altitude. Desmond saw the lights of the chopper. “Echo-Two, I see you,” he said. “He should be coming into your field of view at any moment.”

  “I’ve got ’em,” Porter said as the boat’s light passed beneath him. “I’m on top of him.”

  By now, the boat was beyond the view of the shore. They darted back toward the cars. Desmond ran on ahead of the woman. He passed the Infiniti, paying it little mind. Carmichael followed on his heels.

  The chopper touched down in a grassy area a hundred feet from where they had parked. Desmond yelled instructions to Carmichael over the howl of the rotors. She nodded, then backed away and headed to her car. Desmond climbed into the helicopter, and within seconds the machine lifted off the grass and headed out over the water.

  Carmichael sped through theT in the road, and turned back the way they’d come. Her orders were to return to the Peel estate and pick up Lewis. Once there, they were to wait, watch, and listen.

  The cabin cruiser was more than a mile out by the time the chopper roared past overhead. There wasn’t much they could do at the moment but keep the boat in sight. They would follow him and watch. The boat then turned north, heading upstate.

  Desmond had to smile. Peel was an idiot, he thought. The dope hadn’t expected a helicopter. He was in open water now, and he’d never shake the chopper. There was simply nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

  Minutes later, the Infiniti’s trunk lid opened slowly, and a man dressed in a navy turtleneck sweater and an L.L. Bean hooded coat climbed out, shut the trunk lid, and unlocked the driver’s side door. Jefferson Peel started the car and pulled out of the marina. He drove north on Lake Shore Drive until he hit Solidarity Drive.

  He piloted the car with great caution, watching in every direction for anyone who might be following him. Traffic was light. He followed Solidarity Drive through the gate to Chicago Merrill C. Meigs Field. His headlights washed across a series of modest-size hangars until he spotted a green Range Rover parked up ahead on the tarmac in front of a hangar. Jefferson Peel honked twice—two sharp blasts of the horn. The side door opened. A man stuck his head out for a second, then ducked back inside.

  Peel waited, and suddenly the big hangar door began to retract. The man appeared in the lighted expanse within, and waved him in. Peel drove the car inside.

  At the touch of a button, a motor somewhere in the ceiling engaged, and the big door swung back down. The two men embraced but didn’t waste time.

  “Let’s hurry,” Isaac Rosenblatt said to his friend.

  The plane was fueled and ready, and was awaiting them on the asphalt apron outside. Isaac Rosenblatt was one of Jeff Peel’s oldest and dearest friends, and quite a wealthy man himself. Peel hadn’t hesitated to call him, even at such a late and inconvenient hour. Peel owned two planes himself, a Cessna Piper Cub and a Learjet he used for business travel. But the phone call he had received barely an hour ago had convinced him that someone might follow him from his home, and that it would be safer to utilize some other resource for his flight out of Chicago. He’d phoned Isaac immediately.

  They boarded Rosenblatt’s Learjet. Isaac Rosenblatt settled into the cockpit, preparing for takeoff.

  Peel’s nerves were rattled. The past hour had shaken him deeply. At first he’d not known whether the phone call to his house could be taken seriously, but the cars that had followed him to the marina had quickly convinced him of the gravity of the situation. The face that greeted him in the passenger compartment of the Learjet was unfamiliar. But when Dr. Eucinda Omheimer had spoken with him on the phone less than sixty minutes ago, she assured him that the woman making this flight with him was trustworthy. Jeff Peel respected no one in the world more than Dr. Omheimer. His daughter had been born deaf, and he and his wife had feared she’d never be able to live a productive life. But thanks solely to Dr. Omheimer, his little Lydia was now ten years old and making huge strides in her communication skills. He would trust Dr. Eucinda Omheimer with his life.

  So it was without reservation that he took a seat on the Learjet next to Clara Hayweather.

  56

  THE TAILGATE SLAMMED DOWN AGAINST ITS HINGES, ANDR’mel raised the camper shell’s door until its pneumatic arms caught. It was colder in northern Massachusetts than it had been in New York, and he didn’t plan on staying out in the night air any longer than necessary. He grabbed Joel by the foot and, hauling him out of the bed of the Dodge, let him fall hard to the ground.

  The thump jarred Joel’s head, sending streaks of pain through his skull. It knocked the breath out of him. Wherever this was that they’d ended up, they’d traveled for hours. Joel was exhausted and ached from head to toe. He was starving and feeling dehydrated.

  R’mel left the truck running. The job shouldn’t take too long, and he was deathly afraid of not being able to restart the Dodge out here in the middle of nowhere. The engine chugged, and noxious exhaust puffed from the tailpipe. He snatched his Gerber knife from his belt, whipped out the blade, and knelt over Joel. He ran the blade under each strip of duct tape, and peeled each strip from around the quilted movers’ blanket. Then he stood and gave the blanket a solid tug.

  Joel rolled out onto the cold ground. Without the movers’ blanket, the world was suddenly a very cold place. His wrists and ankles were still bound, the blindfold still covered his eyes, and a strip of duct tape still covered his mouth.

  R’mel, Glock in hand, reached down and removed the blindfold and the tape. Joel gasped for breath, sucking in cold night air, filling his lungs.

  “You will keep your mouth shut and you will listen carefully,” R’mel snapped, pointing the gun at Joel’s head. “Understand?”

  In the weak moonlight it was difficult to see anything. Joel’s eyes had yet to adjust to having any light at all. But he nodded just the same.

  “I’m going to free your hands and feet, and you stand. If you try to run, I will shoot you. Understand?”

  Joel was staring up at the snow falling from the night sky. He nodded.

  R’mel ran the blade through the bindings.

  Standing slowly, Joel rubbed the raw flesh of his wrists. They were situated between a forest and an enormous gouge in the earth that Joel surmised was some sort of rock quarry. The night was gray and cloudy, and there was a dusting of snow on the ground. He turned his face toward the Dodge and spotted what appeared to be a second victim bound by restraints in the bed of the truck.

  “Walk toward those trees,” R’mel ordered.

  They moved into the edge of the forest, crunching through underbrush. When they were nearly fifty yards deep in the foliage, R’mel commanded him to stop. R’mel was holding a spade-shaped shovel with one hand, the Glock in the other
. He marked off a six-foot-by-four-foot rectangle by dragging his heel in the snow. Then he dropped the shovel at Joel’s feet.

  “Dig!” he said.

  Joel gave the shovel a bewildered look, then glanced up at R’mel. “Huh?”

  “Dig.”

  “But…I don’t—”

  “Dig!Or I’ll kill you now!”

  Joel bent at the waist and picked up the shovel. He stepped up to the box outlined in the snow. He hesitated. A brutal squall blew in from the north and rattled through the trees. It felt as though the hide might peel off Joel’s face. He was miserably cold. But he feared the gun more than the cold. The shovel took a bite of frozen earth, the metal spade ringing as it glanced off stones hidden just beneath the snow and soil.

  “Why’d you bring me all the way out here?”

  R’mel ignored him. He fetched a cigarette from a pocket, lit a match, and cupped it in his hands against the wind.

  Joel dug. Progress was slow. His hands began to blister from gripping the wooden handle.

  The drive from New York had worn R’mel down. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He cleared the snow from a small patch of ground and sat with his elbows resting on his knees. His eyes grew heavy as he watched the man dig his own grave. The occasional clanging of the shovel against unearthed rocks kept him at attention.

  Even with the repetitive strokes of the shovel keeping his body in motion, the wind and the cold sapped whatever heat Joel worked to generate. He could no longer feel his fingers. He tasted the blood on his lips. It was no mystery to him that he was preparing his own grave. His and the faceless chap in the back of the pickup truck. Every bite of dirt he removed with the spade shovel was another few inches deeper his final resting place became. He swung the blade and it sank into the soil, the metal ringing out against an embedded stone. Every downward stroke sent vibrations up the wooden handle to be absorbed by his arms. He was laboring to produce his deathbed, and feeling every second of the work. The muscles of his shoulders and chest were on fire. He was panting now; his lungs felt like bags of white-hot coals. Just the physical effort of—