He rounded a corner and just as he passed the intersection of another pathway, Mr. Stanton was there. He appeared seemingly out of nowhere, falling in next to Jack and matching his pace stride for stride. Bob Fosse couldn’t have choreographed the move any better.
“I’m glad things worked out with little Janie,” Mr. Stanton said without preamble. He spoke softly but enunciated the words with razor-sharp clarity.
Jack had been dealing with Mr. Stanton for a long time. He knew The Organization was small in number but powerful, with tentacles stretching into virtually all areas of American life; avenues of communication and influence that stretched far beyond what most could imagine.
But this comment caught him off-guard, and he instinctively swiveled his head to stare intently at his walking companion.
Jack’s contact smiled, his thin lips forming a nearly bloodless line.
“It is to The Organization’s benefit to remain informed,” Mr. Stanton said calmly, as they resumed strolling the paths of Boston Common. “And I must say, the world is a far better place now than it was when Michael Hargus was taking up space in it.”
He paused, obviously awaiting a response, but Jack had nothing to say.
After a moment he resumed speaking. Jack thought he detected the slightest twinge of disappointment in Mr. Stanton’s voice that he hadn’t elicited a reaction.
“I’ll even hazard a guess as to where you’re going next,” the man said. “Unless I’m way off base, you’re driving down the coast to Annapolis.”
Another pause.
More silence from Jack.
“I will admit to being a little confused as to the nature of our meeting, however. My initial thought was that you required some specific equipment or weaponry to complete your little freelance job, something only I could provide with sufficient discretion. But if that were the case, you would have given me those specifics when you set up the meeting.”
Jack waited patiently and continued meandering along the pathway.
“So please tell me, Jack, assuming you’re eventually going to say something: what can The Organization do for you?”
“Nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” he said. “I’m finished. Done. Retiring. Giving my notice. Your assumption about where I’m going today and why is right on target, but this will be my final job. I just can’t do this anymore.”
It was Mr. Stanton’s turn to stop in surprise. He stared at Jack, eyebrows raised, and Jack felt a moment’s satisfaction that he’d finally shocked the man who was always so well informed he seemed to possess almost supernatural cognitive abilities.
“I understand you’ve been shaken by the events of the last few days,” Mr. Stanton said as they resumed their stroll.
A lone female jogger approached along the path, moving in the opposite direction and steadfastly refusing to meet their eyes. They waited in silence for her to continue out of earshot despite the fact her ears were plugged with iPod buds.
When she had disappeared, Jack said, “You’re right, the last few days have clarified some things for me. But my decision to retire is about more than just me being responsible for Janie nearly losing her life.”
“How so?”
“I’m getting old quickly. My body doesn’t recover like it used to. Mike Hargus was bigger, stronger and better conditioned than I was, despite the fact he’d gone mostly to seed. And the results of our encounter are plain to see.” He turned and faced Mr. Stanton head-on, to demonstrate to greatest effect the full extent of the beating he’d taken inside the cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee.
“And yet he’s occupying a slab at the morgue and you’re standing here talking to me.”
“Only because I was extremely lucky. And luck eventually runs out.”
Mr. Stanton shrugged. “What one would consider luck, another would term the inevitable result of superior experience and preparation.”
Jack chuckled. “Let me guess. Debate team champion in college?”
Mr. Stanton returned the smile in silence. It looked contemplative.
“In any event,” Jack said, “this isn’t open to discussion. My mind can’t be changed. I’m here because I wanted to notify you of my decision face-to-face. I felt I owed that to The Organization in general and to you specifically.”
“I appreciate that, Jack.”
They continued along the pathway. Jack had never visited Boston Common despite being a New England native, but he guessed they were moving in a wide circle and before much longer would arrive back where he’d parked his truck.
The silence was companionable.
After a while Mr. Stanton said, “I trust you’ll understand, Mr. Sheridan, if The Organization retains your contact information in our secure computer servers and don’t remove your email address from our operatives’ roster just yet. Things have a way of changing, oftentimes very quickly, as I think you know better than most.”
“This thing won’t,” Jack said firmly. “I’ve given it a lot of thought, over a longer period of time than you probably realize, and I’m comfortable with my decision. It’s not going to change.”
Mr. Stanton smiled again, the skin around his eyes wrinkling in merriment as if he might be enjoying his own private joke. Following his initial shock, he seemed completely unruffled by Jack’s announcement.
“I believe this is where you parked upon your arrival,” Mr. Stanton said.
Jack looked around and realized his assumption about their walking path had been correct. He could see his truck through a thin screen of trees and arbor.
He turned back toward Mr. Stanton to shake his now-former employer’s hand but the man was already walking away. His trench coat flapped lightly in the humid air.
Jack watched as he strolled. He looked like just another elderly man enjoying some air. Eventually he turned a corner and disappeared.
36
The city of Annapolis, Maryland, is located south of Baltimore and east of Washington, D.C., hard by the Chesapeake Bay. It has a rich history and was once, long ago and for a brief period, the capitol of colonial America. Chartered by England’s Queen Anne in 1708, Annapolis is home to the United States Naval Academy and is Maryland’s state capitol.
Jack’s travels had never taken him to Annapolis, and as a United States history buff he’d long wanted to see the city.
He would have preferred his first visit to be under different circumstances.
The drive took a little over eight hours after leaving Boston Common. He took his time, staying within shouting distance of the posted speed limit, not so much because he couldn’t afford to get stopped by law enforcement as because he couldn’t come up with a single reason to hurry.
Bradley Chilcott wasn’t going anywhere, and the prospect of returning to New Hampshire to sit alone inside the four walls of his house struck him as singularly unappealing. Edie and Janie Tolliver would only be a couple of miles away but they might as well be a couple thousand.
As expected, traffic was congested along the Cross-Bronx Expressway approaching the George Washington Bridge, but it broke free again as he entered northern New Jersey. The rest of the drive went smoothly.
By nightfall Jack found himself resting in a comfortable roadside motel—he paid cash and registered under one of his many false identifications—just south of Baltimore. He grabbed a bite to eat and had one drink at an anonymous bar. He was in bed by eleven p.m.
It was important to be rested. Tomorrow he would begin the final job of his career.
37
Morning dawned with apparent reluctance. Jack had now spent three days in Annapolis and not once had he seen the sun, the overcast layer impenetrable and a perfect reflection of his mood.
Today he sat around the corner and a few hundred feet away from Lieutenant Governor Bradley Chilcott’s home. The three days of surveillance had left him as prepared as he felt he could reasonably be.
The lieutenant governor’s mansion was lo
cated in one of Annapolis’s oldest neighborhoods. Each leafy block contained no more than one or two large, well-maintained homes, the yards immaculate and the streets wide and clean and lined with ancient maple trees.
Jack’s most pressing concern had been to identify security. Chilcott’s home was being protected twenty-four/seven, a virtually unprecedented condition for a state lieutenant governor. Given the circumstances of Mike Hargus’s death it seemed clear a paranoid Chilcott had requested the police presence.
The resulting security seemed largely for show, though. During his surveillance, Jack had spent time in virtually every part of the neighborhood from which he could observe Chilcott’s home and he was by now certain that “security” was limited to one officer placed in a cruiser directly across the street from Chilcott’s front door.
The officers rotated shifts every eight hours.
And that was it. He hadn’t seen any evidence of a second officer entering or leaving the house, and he’d spent sixteen-plus hours a day watching.
The lieutenant governor’s wife and two children had left the home at precisely 7:55 a.m. each day so far this week, returning both of the previous days about four o’clock in the afternoon.
The timing of their departure would indicate the woman was dropping the kids off at school. Where she went afterward, and how she spent her day until four o’clock, Jack didn’t know, but his Internet research on Bradley Chilcott had revealed two items of importance where the wife was concerned: she was heavily involved in children’s charitable causes, and rumors of serial infidelity on her husband’s part—among other, darker sexual practices—had swirled for years.
Jack didn’t consider himself any more perceptive than the average person, but it didn’t take a genius to put two-and-two together in this case. Kim Chilcott spent as much time as she could away from her home and husband because their marriage was a sham.
She was either sticking with him out of a misplaced sense of duty, or he held some kind of leverage over her and was forcing her to stay. After all, it wouldn’t do for a politician looking to raise his national profile to undergo a potentially nasty divorce.
None of that mattered to Jack.
All he cared about was that neither the wife nor the children return home unexpectedly today. Barring some unusual occurrence—one of the kids coming home from school sick would be the most likely possibility—he felt reasonably confident that once they exited the house this morning, his target’s family would not be back until late afternoon.
Chilcott himself had maintained a seemingly predictable schedule as well. Both days he’d left his home shortly after the rest of his family and then returned around one p.m. Presumably the man drove to the state house each morning, but apparently there was either very little in the way of real work to occupy a lieutenant governor’s time, or he simply wasn’t all that motivated.
Again, Jack didn’t care which scenario was accurate.
He weighed the advantages of another day or two of surveillance—additional information could not possibly be a bad thing when operating solo—against the potential risks and decided he couldn’t afford to hang around this neighborhood any longer.
He’d parked his truck in the lot of a busy shopping mall ten miles away and rented a different car each day. Doing so had allowed him to maintain anonymity, but the fact was that a neighborhood like this represented about the worst-case scenario for conducting surveillance. People tended to pay attention and watch out for their neighbors, and there simply wasn’t enough through traffic in the area to allow him to blend in effectively.
Jack had pushed his luck as far as he dared. It was time to proceed.
He watched the house from a safe distance until Kim Chilcott’s white Volvo backed out of the driveway and accelerated toward Annapolis. She waggled her fingers to the officer parked across the street and received a half-hearted wave in return.
The tops of two small heads were just visible in the rear window as she passed the cross street on which Jack had parked.
Good. Both children were on their way to school.
Chilcott should now depart within the next few minutes and return shortly after lunchtime.
The house would be empty for several hours.
Chilcott’s garage door opened a few minutes later, exactly as anticipated, and the lieutenant governor drove away.
Jack waited a little longer. He expected to see nothing more of interest and didn’t.
Eventually he started the rental car and drove off in the direction Kim Chilcott had gone a few minutes earlier.
38
Breakfast consisted of hot black coffee. The franchise coffee shop was just off the highway along the route to an office-supply store located roughly halfway between Annapolis and Baltimore. Jack was able to grab the caffeine without wasting more than five minutes in the process.
Leaving Annapolis just to purchase his supplies was undoubtedly overkill—pun definitely intended—since none of the materials Jack needed would be in any way suspicious or memorable, but he couldn’t think of a single good reason to take unnecessary chances.
And again, he was in no hurry to rush back to New Hampshire and be alone.
At the office supply store he paid cash for a medium-sized cardboard box and a roll of bright blue packing tape.
He returned to the rental car and folded the box together while sitting in the parking lot. Then he picked up a couple of decent-sized rocks and dropped them inside the box for stability’s sake. He closed the cover and taped it securely shut, then reinforced the corners and edges of the box with the tape. He did so not to protect the box but to make it as visible and eye-catching as possible.
When finished, he leaned back and inspected his little arts-and-crafts project with a critical eye.
Shrugged.
He supposed it would do; it only had to fool a few people for a few minutes to accomplish his goal. After that it would become irrelevant.
He left the lot and drove to a corner convenience store a block away. Bought a prepaid cell phone, the cheapest he could find. It would only be used twice before being discarded forever.
Back in his car, he examined his supplies and reviewed his game plan, searching for flaws. The plan itself was nothing complicated, but given the constraints he was operating under and the lack of proper preparation, he guessed it was about as solid as he could hope for.
I suppose I’ll find out.
***
The long-threatened storm had finally arrived while Jack was buying his supplies, and now a cold, hard mid-Atlantic rain pelted his windshield.
He hoped the sudden downpour wasn’t an omen.
Decided not to think about it.
He returned to Bradley Chilcott’s neighborhood via a route that would funnel him to a point well north of the police cruiser he knew would still be stationed outside the lieutenant governor’s home. It had been important to remain anonymous before. It was critical now.
He knew he would find what he was looking for relatively close to Chilcott’s home and he was right. Two blocks away and around the corner, to be precise, a maroon SUV sat at the curb. It was parked halfway between two driveways and directly beneath one of the massive old maple trees dotting the neighborhood.
The car was empty.
The neighborhood was quiet.
Jack picked up the cardboard box he’d constructed earlier and stepped out of the rental car. The rain slanted at an angle, splashing off the pavement as he moved to the SUV. He ignored the deluge and bent almost to the ground, tossing the package under the big vehicle, aiming for a spot beneath the center of the car. It skidded to a stop more or less where he had hoped and he nodded, satisfied with the result.
He turned and walked back to his rental. Climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. Drove slowly back in the direction from which he’d come just minutes earlier. He circled the neighborhood, giving Chilcott’s house a wide berth, and then eased to a stop a block west of his target’
s empty home. He was now almost directly opposite the maroon SUV with the package on the wet road beneath it.
Jack eased the car forward until he could just make out the police cruiser through his side window. It was a block-and-a-half away. A row of neatly trimmed shrubs ran along the property line, shielding Jack’s car from view of the officer inside the cruiser.
Perfect.
He lifted his burner phone off the front seat and punched in a number he’d memorized earlier. The call was answered on the second ring.
“Annapolis Police.” The voice was clipped and professional.
“Yes, hello,” Jack said, putting just the slightest hesitation into his voice. “Uh, I live at Seventy-Two Elm here in Annapolis and I’m calling to report a suspicious package under my car.”
“Suspicious package?”
“That’s right. I stopped at home for a few minutes and when I went back outside I spotted a good-sized box under my car. It definitely wasn’t in the road when I arrived and it looks like it was placed there intentionally. I’m a divorce attorney and my line of work unfortunately earns me plenty of enemies. I think something’s wrong. Could you send an officer to check it out, please? I’d be very grateful.”
The dispatcher sounded uninterested and unconvinced of the severity of the situation, but she promised to send an officer. He thanked her and disconnected the call.
Now he just had to wait. It shouldn’t take long.
Police departments everywhere were terminally short-handed. Jack was banking on the fact that the officer standing duty outside Chilcott’s home would be bored and tired of staring at Bradley Chilcott’s closed front door. He would hear the address being broadcast by the dispatcher and realize he was only a block or so away.
He would volunteer to go check out the suspicious package. The neighborhood was deserted, Chilcott was off at work and why the hell did the lieutenant governor need twenty-four/seven protection on an empty house anyway? The officer would reason that he would be away from his position outside the Chilcott home for maybe three minutes, and then he’d return to his location after clearing the call.
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