There was only one phone call left to make. He’d have to call Rines and tell him he’d failed. Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe, after he’d made his report and let wiser brains go to work on this mess, maybe the earth could be persuaded to swallow him up.
Chapter Eight
TROTTER DIDN’T KNOW IF it was control or shock that kept Regina from screaming when the car hit the water. He found out as soon as the river lapped over the top of the roof.
“Oh, my God,” she screamed. She started scrabbling for the door handle. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“We will.” He made sure the electric locks were closed. Thank God for luxury cars. “Now shut up and save air.”
It worked for about a quarter of a second. Then a stream of bubbles erupted from the trunk, and the weight of the engine pulled the nose of the car the twenty feet or so to the bottom. The buoyancy of the air in the passenger compartment left them facing down at a forty-five-degree angle. The thump brought new screams out of her, without words this time.
The worst thing about being in a situation where someone panics (however justified the panic may be) is that it forces you to keep your own fear hidden. Trotter hadn’t done this because he was looking forward to it. It was just that the alternative was worse.
Right now, he was afraid Regina was going to use up all the oxygen, and they’d either suffocate or have to leave the car too soon and be shot.
“Shut up,” he commanded. “Dammit, Regina, I know what I’m doing!” Would I lie to you? he thought.
It had no effect at all. He hit her. Punched her hard on the left shoulder, twice.
She shut up. She sat rubbing her shoulder and looking at him in the bottom-reflected glow of the headlights.
“You done?” he asked quietly. She looked at him. “Because I’ll knock you out if I have to.”
“Kill me,” she whispered. “Please. I have nightmares about dying like this.”
“You won’t anymore.”
“Of course not, I’ll be dead.”
Trotter started to take a deep breath and stopped himself. Shallow breaths would do. He looked at the seals around the edges of the windows. There was a slow, tiny leak. This was a well-made car.
Regina was starting to whimper. He almost wished she’d start screaming again. He could hold it against her when she screamed.
It was inevitable. Talking wasted air, but he was going to have to talk to her.
“I’m going to unlock the door now,” he said. Regina’s head came up; she had a kind of wild hope in her eyes that died when Trotter went on to say, “But the doors won’t open. Water pressure.”
“And we’ll die.”
“We will not die.” It was ridiculous. She was starting to sap his confidence. It occurred to him he would feel better punching her again, or punching something, but he decided it would be counterproductive.
He hit the switch in the console to his left and unlocked the doors. It wasn’t until he’d done that he remembered the water might have shorted out some of the circuits.
Which reminded him of something else. “I’m going to turn off the headlights now.” He could feel water coming through the window, coating the inside of the door like a coat of paint and soaking his sleeve.
“What difference will that make?” Regina said.
“It will leave us in pitch blackness. Don’t scream, just keep listening.” He turned out the lights and surprised himself with how right he was. It was darker than the inside of a black velvet bag, and it suddenly seemed colder. Trotter suppressed a shiver. Keep talking. Had to keep talking.
“Water coming in on your side?” he asked brightly.
“Y-yes.”
“You won’t believe it, but that’s good. Now, Bash, the reason we’re down here is that this is the one place they can’t follow us. They think we’re dead now, probably thought so the second the lights went out.”
“That’s why you—”
“That’s why I turned the lights off. Now, I figure we had about fifteen minutes of air when we came down here—”
“How long ago was that?” The voice quavered, but the question was relevant, and it showed maybe a little trace of hope.
The radium slashes on Trotter’s watch were the only light in the world. “Not quite five minutes.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not. Honest. Now. I’m figuring they’ve gone away by now up there, and talking cuts our time down a little, so we’ll start getting out of here right away.”
“You know how?”
“I know how. If Mary Jo Kopechne knew what I know, Ted Kennedy would be President by now.”
“That’s sick. You’re sick.”
“But accurate. Now do what I tell you. Unbuckle your seat belt and climb over into the back seat.” He heard the click and the rustling. She kicked him in the head going over in the pitch blackness.
“Excuse me.”
“It’s all right. Now I have to let water into the car. Can you swim?”
“Hell of a time to ask. Yes, I can swim.”
“That’s good, but we could have done this even if you couldn’t. Now, as soon as enough water is in the car, the pressure will equalize and we can get the doors open. The air will be trapped up where you are, so you can keep breathing until the last second. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, as if she had a choice.
“I’m going to open the front windows, now,” he said.
Five seconds later, Regina said, “Go ahead.”
“I changed my mind,” he told her. Which was true. He changed his mind because the circuit that operated the power windows had shorted out.
Regina said, “Oh, God.”
“Regina, please.” Trotter started thinking rapidly. The first decision he came to was that he was going to have to try to break one of the windows. Which would be, of course, specially hardened safety glass. The second decision was that if he couldn’t do it, he would put Regina out of her misery so that her last minutes wouldn’t be filled with gasping and terror.
Breaking a window. Leverage, and something to hit with. He could hear a perceptible trickle now. Water was coming in, but not fast enough to save them.
What could he use? The seat-belt buckles were hard enough, but didn’t pack weight enough to do the job. He’d powder his hand before he could punch through, especially with the pressure reinforcing the glass.
Regina was being incredibly brave back there. Either that, or she had fainted.
“Bash?”
“I’m okay,” she said in a small voice.
“Everything’s under control,” Trotter lied. Well, thinking was getting him nowhere. The effort of brute force would use up the air and kill them faster, but you had to go out doing something. It would have to be the seat-belt buckle. Trotter felt for the button, pressed it, and the seat belt rolled away. As it did, the forward tilt of the car brought him sliding forward. He put a hand forward to stop himself. He bent a finger painfully against the steering wheel, then finally braced himself against the windshield.
He felt the cold glass against his fingers and called himself an idiot.
He slid across the center hump into the other bucket seat. There was more water on Regina’s side than there had been on his—maybe her window hadn’t been quite as tightly closed. Because Regina was smaller, his legs were cramped. That was good, too.
Trotter worked his legs up over the dashboard, sank down low in the passenger seat, braced himself, and began smashing the heel of his shoe into the windshield.
Again and again he pistoned his right leg forward, trying in the dark to hit the same spot each time. He was starting to feel short of breath, but he decided it was from effort.
On the twentieth blow he heard a sort of creaking. On the twenty-fifth he heard a crack, and two strokes later his foot broke through to the cold of the Kirk River.
The water poured in. Trotter kicked a few more times, making the hole bigger, but soon he had to stop. H
e scrambled back to join Regina. He had to yell over the rush of the water. “Breathe deep!”
“What?”
“Breathe deep! No sense leaving any oxygen behind.”
Now she was yelling something. She had to say it twice before Trotter could make it out—“Shoes off!” An excellent idea.
By now, the water was lapping the top of the front seat. Trotter reached down and found the front door handle, pulled it toward him, then leaned his shoulder against the door. It budged one grudging inch, but that was enough. More water began to pour through, and the door swung open.
He and Regina yelled at each other to take one last deep breath. Then he said, “Hold my hand.” It took some groping, but the hands found each other. Trotter felt his way through the doorway, then guided Regina out. Hand in hand, they kicked to the surface.
PART FIVE
Chapter One
“I’M SURPRISED YOU DIDN’T freeze to death,” Fenton Rines said. He pointed at a pile of brown and green and white that sat on a plate near the television set. “Mind if I have some more of this? I’ve been too worked up to eat.”
“Eat it all,” Trotter told him. “Room service runs till midnight, and it’s government money, anyway.” He’d raised his head to look; now he eased it back to the pillow.
Rines was somewhat at a loss. With the Congressman down, the only reasonable move to make was to find Trotter. He’d thought of going to the President, but—and this was a ridiculous situation—he didn’t know how much the President knew. The Agency (meaning the Congressman) reported directly to the President, but Rines had gathered he didn’t report much besides results. If the President knew that FBI Special Agent Fenton Rines had been moonlighting for the Agency, it would have been no trouble to get in to see him. If he didn’t know, though, that would mean going through channels, four layers or more of functionaries, most of whom owed favors to some newsman or other, or would like a newsman to owe a favor to them. This was not the time for the existence of the Agency to be revealed to the press. And it really wasn’t the time for the word to get out that it had, through Rines, been using the FBI as a sort of farm team.
Which left Trotter. Who couldn’t be found, or at least hadn’t been the last time Rines had spoken to Joe Albright. And there was the operation in progress. Trotter might be missing because he was out chasing something, or he might be missing because something had caught him. Which would leave the operation exactly nowhere. Albright didn’t know enough about it. Rines made his excuses in Washington and caught a plane north.
He was in-flight when Trotter turned up at Albright’s place soaking wet and shaking like a paint mixer from the cold. Rines had suspected that might happen and had left an underling at the phone with orders to arrange a meet. Rines had phoned back to Washington when he arrived, and was glad to know Trotter was still around. He was even more gratified to learn that he’d holed up under another name at a businessman’s motel near the airport. A place with room service open until midnight, which delivered really excellent nachos.
He munched away at corn chips and cheese and mashed avocado and sour cream and looked at the Congressman’s son. Rines had always known the young man was strange. From what he knew of his background and his relationship with his old man, it was hard to see how Trotter could have turned out any way but strange.
But Rines hadn’t been prepared for the reaction his news brought. Trotter reacted, at first, like a son. Like anybody’s son, like Rines himself, when he’d heard of his father’s condition.
“A stroke?” Trotter said. His face showed nothing but concern. “My God, I’d better get down there.”
He was actually reaching for a jacket when Rines said, “And do what?”
Trotter stood there, holding the jacket.
“Besides,” Rines went on, “he’s in intensive care. And—”
“And intensive care visits are restricted to immediate family,” Trotter completed for him. “And it’s a well-known fact that the Distinguished Gentleman has no family.” He walked calmly to the closet and replaced the jacket. Then he slipped out of his shoes and lay down on the bed. “I’ve got nachos over there by the TV,” he told Rines. “Help yourself.”
And he hadn’t shown a trace of emotion since, expect perhaps a vague amusement. He asked how bad the stroke was (pretty bad) and asked what the chances were the Congressman could come back (unknown).
“Is he going to babble?” Trotter had asked.
“Babble?”
“You know, talk without realizing what he’s saying.”
Rines was quiet for a second. He’d seen and done a lot, but the realization that he had just heard a son ask if his father should be killed before he inadvertently spilled something embarrassing, in exactly the same tone of voice he’d ask a pharmacist for a bottle of aspirin, took a little digesting.
“I doubt it,” Rines said. “It happened in his office. I found him. He was a mess. He couldn’t keep drool back, let alone talk intelligibly.”
“All right, then.”
“Who’s in charge now?” Rines wanted to know.
“Huh? You are.”
“Oh, come on, Trotter—”
Trotter was amused. “I’m serious. The only operation I know about is this one. I don’t know anything about the rest of the Agency’s personnel, what they’ve done, or what they’re good for.”
“You could learn.”
“From whom?”
“I could teach you that much.”
“Which means you already know. I’ve got a job to do. Not my father’s. You hold it together until the old man gets well.”
“Assuming he does,” Rines said. “What happens if he doesn’t?”
“Then Knox County is going to have to hold a special election, and you’re going to have to have a chat with the President.”
“Look, I’m serious about this.” Rines didn’t like that little note of panic he heard in his voice. He decided to try again. “I don’t like the implications for the Bureau. If a reporter gets hold of this, it could be Watergate all over again.”
“You’re the one who spent three years finding out what makes the Congressman tick.”
“You’re a big help, Trotter.”
“Just think of me as Fred Dean, all right?”
“Who?”
“Fred Dean, of the San Francisco ’49ers. He’d come into the lineup only to rush the passer in long-yardage situations. I come into the lineup to bust up the Russians when they’re trying to work a Cronus operation.”
“And to hell with your country.”
Trotter smiled. Rines was a trained and experienced man. He had a gun on his hip. He was standing, and Trotter was lying on a bed. It all meant nothing. He saw the smile and remembered that this young man was dangerous.
Trotter spoke, very matter-of-fact. “That kind of shit didn’t work when my father pulled it on me. It won’t work for you, either.”
Rines decided to forget it for now. “Made any progress?”
“My usual kind.”
Now Rines smiled. Trotter might not be exactly sane, but he could be charming. “In other words, chaos.”
“I think we’ve gone beyond chaos this time. We’re dealing with pure pandemonium. We’ve got two sets of Russian agents, working, as far as I can tell, at cross-purposes. We’ve got the subject’s daughter stashed away under an assumed name at a hospital, and according to Albright, the son would shoot me on sight, except he’s too civilized. And we’ve also got a couple of corpses with inexplicably wet hair.”
“Apparently yours got pretty wet, too. I’m surprised you didn’t freeze to death.” Rines got another helping of nachos.
“It’s all government money, anyway,” Trotter said, lowering his head again to the pillow. “Actually,” he went on, “the water itself wasn’t bad. Or, it wasn’t as bad as the air on the wet body was. It took me half an hour to get a car to stop. Thought we were going to lose Little Bash to hypothermia.”
“Lit
tle Bash?”
Trotter’s smile was as warm as his last one had been chilling. “Never mind. In-joke.”
“So you’re going to let everybody think you’re dead?”
“Missing, anyway. Just for today. Rest up. I’ll try to keep Regina out of the way a day or so longer.”
Rines nodded approval. The ability to bring back a daughter who had been feared dead would be powerful leverage to use on Petra Hudson. “I don’t think you can keep it going longer than a day or two,” Rines said.
“Neither do I. The hospital’s seventy-five miles away from here, but the farther you get from the big cities, the less distance means. The Hudsons are too well known for real safety. I should have punched her in the face instead of the arm.”
“Why?” Rines did not like the idea of women being hit. Not for any reason.
“So there’d be a bandage on her face and no one would recognize her.”
“Why did you hit her at all?”
“She panicked and wouldn’t listen. Relax, Galahad. It was to save her life.” Rines made a noise. “Besides,” Trotter went on, “I paid for it. She came out in a bruise, and the cold air made it seize up when we hit the surface. I had to haul her in by the chin like a lifeguard half the width of that goddam river.”
“Think it’s time to brace the mother?”
Trotter sighed. “I guess so. I hoped to put Azrael out of business first, but he—or they—have been too much for me so far.”
“The sooner the better, if you ask me.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Trotter said.
“Promise.”
“What about tomorrow morning?”
“I’ve got a plan for tomorrow morning. Something unprecedented for me.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to simplify things a little.”
Chapter Two
TROTTER WALKED AROUND SMOLINSKI’S neighborhood a few times. There was a newspaper on clips under the mailbox, and white showed through the window in the box itself.
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