Persuader

They were still there in the rag in the dip behind the weed stalks. I left Doll"s PSM where it was. I preferred the Glock. I unwrapped it and checked it carefully, out of habit.

Seventeen bullets in the gun, seventeen in each of the spare magazines. Fifty-one ninemillimeter Parabellums. If I fired one, I"d probably have to fire them all. By which time somebody would have won and somebody would have lost. I put the magazines in my pockets and the gun itself in my waistband and tracked all the way around the far side of the garage block for a preliminary distant look at the wall. It was still all lit up. The lights blazed harsh and blue and angry, like a stadium. The lodge was bathed in the glow. The razor wire glittered. The light was a solid bar, thirty yards deep, bright as day, with absolute darkness beyond. The gate stood closed and chained. The whole thing looked like the outer perimeter of a nineteenth-century prison. Or an asylum.

I gazed at it until I had figured out how to get past it and then I headed around inside the cobbled courtyard. The apartment above the garages was dark and quiet. The garage doors were all closed, but none of them had locks. They were big old-fashioned timber things. They had been installed way back before anybody had thought of stealing cars.

Four sets of doors, four garages. The left-hand one held the Cadillac. I had already been in there. So I checked the others, slow and quiet. The second had yet another Lincoln Town Car in it, black, the same as Angel Doll"s, the same as the one the bodyguards had used. It was waxed and shiny and its doors were locked.

The third garage was completely empty. Nothing in it at all. It was clean and swept. I could see broom tracks in the dusty oil patches on the floor. There were a few carpet fibers here and there. Whoever had swept up had missed them. They were short and stiff.

I couldn"t make out the color in the darkness. They looked gray. They looked like they had been pulled out of a rug"s burlap backing. They meant nothing to me. So I moved on.

I found what I wanted in the fourth garage. I opened the doors wide and let in just about enough moonlight to see by. The dusty old Saab the maid had used for her marketing was in there, parked head-in close to a workbench. There was a grimy window behind the bench. Gray moonlight on the ocean outside. The bench had a vise screwed to it and was covered in tools. The tools were old. Their handles were wood that had darkened with age and oil. I found a bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. The handle was bulbous, turned from oak. The spike was maybe two inches long. I put it into the vise, maybe a quarter-inch deep. Tightened the vise hard. Pulled on the handle and bent the spike into a neat right angle. Loosened the vise and checked my work and put it away in my shirt pocket.

Then I found a chisel. It was a woodworking item. It had a half-inch blade and a nice ash handle. It was probably seventy years old. I hunted around and found a carborundum whetstone and a rusty can of sharpening fluid. Dabbed some fluid on the stone and spread it with the tip of the chisel. Worked the steel back and forth until it showed bright. One of the many high schools I went to was an old-fashioned place in Guam where shop was graded by how well you did with the scut work, like sharpening tools. We all scored high.

It was the kind of accomplishment we were interested in. That cla.s.s had the best knives I ever saw. I turned the chisel over and did the other face. I got the edge square and true. It looked like high-grade Pittsburgh steel. I wiped it on my pants. Didn"t test the edge on my thumb. I didn"t particularly want to bleed. I knew it was razor sharp just by looking at it.

I came out into the courtyard and squatted down in the angle of the walls and loaded my pockets. I had the chisel if things needed to stay quiet, and I had the Glock if it was OK to go noisy. Then I scoped out my priorities. The house first, I decided. There was a strong possibility that I would never get another look at it.

The outer door to the kitchen porch was locked, but the mechanism was crude. It was a token three-lever affair. I put the bent spike of the bradawl in like a key and felt for the tumblers. They were big and obvious. It took me less than a minute to get inside. I stopped again and listened carefully. I didn"t want to walk in on the cook. Maybe she was up late, baking a special pie. Or maybe the Irish girl was in there doing something. But there was only silence. I crossed the porch and knelt down in front of the inner door.

Same crude lock. Same short time. I backed off a foot and swung the door open. Smelled the kitchen smells. Listened again. The room was cold and deserted. I put the bradawl on the floor in front of me. Put the chisel next to it. Added the Glock and the spare magazines. I didn"t want to set the metal detector off. In the still of the night it would have sounded like a siren. I slid the bradawl along the floor, tight against the boards.

Pushed it right through the doorway and into the kitchen. Did the same with the chisel.

Kept it tight against the floor and rolled it all the way inside. Almost all commercial metal detectors have a dead zone right at the bottom. That"s because men"s dress shoes are made with a steel shank in the sole. It gives the shoe flexibility and strength. Metal detectors are designed to ignore shoes. It makes sense, because otherwise they would beep every time a guy with decent footwear pa.s.sed through.

I slid the Glock through the dead zone and followed it with one magazine at a time.

Pushed everything as far inside as I could reach. Then I stood up and walked through the door. Closed it quietly behind me. Picked up all my gear and reloaded my pockets.

Debated taking my shoes off. It"s easier to creep around quietly in socks. But if it comes to it, shoes are great weapons. Kick somebody with your shoes on, and you disable them.

With your shoes off, you break a toe. And they take time to put back on. If I had to get out fast, I didn"t want to be running around on the rocks barefoot. Or climbing the wall. I decided to keep them on and walk carefully. It was a solidly-built house. Worth the risk. I went to work.

First I searched the kitchen for a flashlight. Didn"t find one. Most houses on the end of a long power line spur have outages from time to time, so most people who live in them keep something handy. But the Becks didn"t seem to. The best I could find was a box of kitchen matches. I put three in my pocket and struck one on the box. Used the flickering light to look for the big bunch of keys I had left on the table. Those keys would have helped me a lot, but they weren"t there. Not on the table, not on some hook near the door, not anywhere. I wasn"t very surprised. It would have been too good to be true to find them.

I blew out the match and found my way in the dark to the head of the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs.

Crept all the way down and struck another match with my thumbnail at the bottom.

Followed the tangle of wires on the ceiling back to the breaker box. There was a flashlight on a shelf right next to it. Cla.s.sic dumb place to keep a flashlight. If a breaker pops the box is your destination, not your starting point.

The flashlight was a big black Maglite the length of a nightstick. Six D cells inside. We used to use them in the army. They were guaranteed unbreakable, but we found that depended on what you hit with them, and how hard. I lit it up and blew out the match.

Spat on the burned stub and put it in my pocket. Used the flashlight to check the breaker box. It had a gray metal door with twenty circuit breakers inside. None of them was labeled gatehouse. It must have been separately supplied, which made sense. No point in running power all the way to the main house and then running some of it all the way back to the lodge. Better to give the lodge its own tap on the incoming power line. I wasn"t surprised, but I was vaguely disappointed. It would have been sweet to be able to turn the wall lights off. I shrugged and closed the box and turned around and went to look at the two locked doors I had found that morning.

They weren"t locked anymore. First thing you always do before attacking a lock is to check it"s not already open. Nothing makes you feel stupider than picking a lock that isn"t locked. These weren"t. Both doors opened easily with a turn of the handle.

The first room was completely empty. It was more or less a perfect cube, maybe eight feet on a side. I played the flashlight beam all over it. It had rock walls and a cement floor. No windows. It looked like a storeroom. It was immaculately clean and there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. No carpet fibers. Not even trash or dirt. It had been swept and vacuumed, probably earlier that day. It was a little dank and damp. Exactly how you would expect a stone cellar to feel. I could smell the distinctive dusty smell of a vacuum cleaner bag. And there was a trace of something else in the air. A faint, tantalizing odor right at the edge of imperceptibility. It was vaguely familiar. Rich, and papery.

Something I should know. I stepped right inside the room and shut off the flashlight.

Closed my eyes and stood in the absolute blackness and concentrated. The smell disappeared. It was like my movements had disturbed the air molecules and the one part in a billion I was interested in had diffused itself into the clammy background of underground granite. I tried hard, but I couldn"t get it. So I gave it up. It was like memory. To chase it meant to lose it. And I didn"t have time to waste.

I switched the flashlight back on and came out into the bas.e.m.e.nt corridor and closed the door quietly behind me. Stood still and listened. I could hear the furnace. Nothing else. I tried the next room. It was empty, too. But only in the sense that it was currently unoccupied. It had stuff in it. It was a bedroom.

It was a little larger than the storeroom. It was maybe twelve-by-ten. The flashlight beam showed me rock walls, a cement floor, no windows. There was a thin mattress on the floor. It had wrinkled sheets and an old blanket strewn across it. No pillows. It was cold in the room. I could smell stale food, stale perfume, sleep, and sweat, and fear.

I searched the whole room carefully. It was dirty. But I found nothing of significance until I pulled the mattress aside. Under it, scratched into the cement of the floor, was a single word: justice. It was written all in spidery capital letters. They were uneven and chalky. But they were clear. And emphatic. And underneath the letters were numbers. Six of them, in three groups of two. Month, day, year. Yesterday"s date. The letters and the numbers were scratched deeper and wider than marks made with a pin or a nail or the tip of a scissor. I guessed they had been made with the tine of a fork. I put the mattress back in position and took a look at the door. It was solid oak. It was thick and heavy. It had no inside keyhole. Not a bedroom. A prison cell.

I stepped outside and closed the door and stood still again and listened hard. Nothing. I spent fifteen minutes on the rest of the bas.e.m.e.nt and found nothing at all, not that I expected to. I wouldn"t have been left to run around there that morning if there was anything for a person to find. So I killed the flashlight and crept back up the stairs in the dark. Went back to the kitchen and searched it until I found a big black trash can liner.

Then I wanted a towel. Best thing I could find was a worn linen square designed to dry dishes with. I folded both items neatly and jammed them in my pockets. Then I came back out into the hallway and went to look at the parts of the house I hadn"t seen before.

There were a lot to choose from. The whole place was a warren. I started at the front, where I had first come in the day before. The big oak door was closed tight. I gave it a wide berth, because I didn"t know how sensitive the metal detector was. Some of them beep when you"re a foot away. The floors were solid oak planks, covered in rugs. I stepped carefully, but I wasn"t too worried about noise. The rugs and the drapes and the paneling would soak up sound.

I scouted the whole of the ground floor. Only one place caught my attention. On the north side next to the room where I had spent the time with Beck was another locked door. It was opposite the family dining room, across a wide interior hallway. It was the only locked door on the ground floor. Therefore it was the only room that interested me. Its lock was a big bra.s.s item from back when things were manufactured with pride and aplomb. It had all kinds of fancy filigree edges where it was screwed into the wood. The screw heads themselves were rubbed smooth by a hundred and fifty years of polishing. It was probably original to the house. Some old artisan up in nineteenth-century Portland had probably fashioned it by hand, in between making boat chandlery. It took me about a second and a half to open.

The room was a den. Not an office, not a study, not a family room. I covered every inch with the flashlight beam. There was no television in there. No desk, no computer. It was just a room, simply furnished in an old-fashioned style. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled across the window. There was a big armchair padded with b.u.t.toned red leather.

There was a gla.s.s-fronted collector"s cabinet. And rugs. They were three-deep on the floor. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o"clock. I had been on the loose for nearly an hour. I stepped into the room and closed the door quietly.

The collector"s cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked gla.s.s doors above them. Behind the gla.s.s were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the cla.s.sic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone"s soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.

Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.

They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn"t Richard coming down. It wasn"t a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever.

Quinn would disappear again.

There was no sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just a crushing silence. Then I heard the front door open. I heard the rattle of a chain and a lock springing back and the click of a latch and the sucking sound of a copper insulating strip releasing its grip on the edge of the door. A second later the door closed again. I felt a tiny shudder in the structure of the house as the heavy oak hit the frame. No beep from the metal detector.

Whoever had pa.s.sed through it wasn"t carrying a weapon. Or even a set of car keys.

I waited. Duke was surely fast asleep. And he wasn"t the trusting type. I guessed he wouldn"t walk around at night without a gun. Neither would Beck. But either one of them might be smart enough just to stand there in the hallway and open and close the door to make me think they had gone out through it. When in fact they hadn"t. When in fact they were still standing right there, gun drawn, staring back into the gloom, waiting for me to show myself.

I sat down sideways in the red leather chair. Took the Glock out of my pants and aimed it left-handed at the door. Soon as they opened it wider than nine millimeters I would fire.

Until then, I would wait. I was good at waiting. If they thought they were going to wait me out, they had picked the wrong guy.

But a whole hour later there was still absolute silence out in the hallway. No sound of any kind. No vibrations. There was n.o.body there. Certainly not Duke. He would have fallen asleep by then and hit the deck. Not Beck, either. He was an amateur. It takes tremendous skill to keep absolutely still and silent for a whole hour. So the door thing hadn"t been a trick. Somebody had gone out unarmed into the night.

I knelt down and used the bradawl on the tumblers again. Lay full-length on the floor and reached up and pulled the door open. A precaution. Anybody waiting for the door to open would have their eyes locked at head height. I would see them before they saw me. But there was n.o.body waiting. The hallway was empty. I stood upright and locked the door behind me. Walked silently down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs and put the flashlight back in its place. Felt my way back upstairs. Crept to the kitchen and slid all my hardware along the floor and out the door into the porch. Locked it behind me and crouched down and picked up all my stuff and checked the view out back. Saw nothing except an empty gray world of moonlit rocks and ocean.

I locked the porch door behind me and kept very close to the side of the house. Ducked through deep black shadows and made it back to the courtyard wall. Found the dip in the rock and wrapped the chisel and the bradawl in the rag and left them there. I couldn"t take them with me. They would tear the trash bag. I followed the courtyard wall onward toward the ocean. I aimed to get down on the rocks right behind the garage block, to the south, completely out of sight of the house.

I made it halfway there. Then I froze.

Elizabeth Beck was sitting on the rocks. She was wearing a white bathrobe over a white nightgown. She looked like a ghost, or an angel. She had her elbows on her knees and she was staring into the darkness in the east like a statue.

I kept completely still. I was thirty feet away from her. I was dressed all in black but if she glanced to her left I would show up against the horizon. And sudden movement would give me away. So I just stood there. The ocean swell lapped in and out, quiet and lazy. It was a peaceful sound. Hypnotic motion. She was staring at the water. She must have been cold. There was a slight breeze and I could see it in her hair.

I inched downward like I was trying to melt into the rock. Bent my knees and spread my fingers and eased myself down into a crouch. She moved. Just a quizzical turn of her head, like something had suddenly occurred to her. She looked right at me. Gave no sign of surprise. She stared directly at me for minute after minute. Her long fingers were laced together. Her pale face was lit by moonlight reflected off the lapping water. Her eyes were open, but clearly she wasn"t seeing anything. Or else I was low enough down against the sky that she thought I was a rock or a shadow.

She sat like that for maybe ten more minutes, staring in my direction. She started shivering in the cold. Then she moved her head again, decisively, and looked away from me at the sea to her right. She unlaced her fingers and moved her hands and smoothed her hair back. Turned her face up to the sky. She stood up slowly. She was barefoot. She shuddered, like she was cold, or sad. She held her arms out sideways like a tightrope walker and stepped toward me. The ground was hurting her feet. That was clear. She balanced herself with her arms and tested every step. She came within a yard of me. Went right on by and headed back to the house. I watched her go. The wind caught her robe.

Her nightdress flattened against her body. She disappeared behind the courtyard wall. A long moment later I heard the front door open. There was a tiny pause and then a soft clump as it closed. I dropped flat to the ground and rolled onto my back. Stared up at the stars.

I lay like that as long as I dared and then got up and scrambled the final fifty feet to the edge of the sea. Shook out the trash bag and stripped off my clothes and packed them neatly into it. I wrapped the Glock inside my shirt with the spare magazines. Stuffed my socks into my shoes and packed them on top and followed them with the small linen towel. Then I tied the bag tight and held it by the neck. Slipped into the water, dragging it behind me.

The ocean was cold. I had figured it would be. I was on the coast of Maine in April. But this was cold. It was icy. It was jarring and numbing. It took my breath away. Inside a second I was chilled to the bone. Five yards offsh.o.r.e my teeth were chattering and I was going nowhere and the salt stung my eyes.

I kicked onward until I was ten yards out and I could see the wall. It glared with light. I couldn"t get through it. Couldn"t get over it. So I had to go around it. No choice. I reasoned with myself. I had to swim a quarter-mile. I was strong but not fast and I was towing a bag, so it would take me maybe ten minutes. Fifteen, at the absolute maximum.

That was all. And n.o.body dies of exposure in fifteen minutes. n.o.body. Not me, anyway.

Not tonight.

I fought the cold and the swell and built a kind of sidestroke rhythm. I towed the bag with my left hand for ten leg-kicks. Then I changed to my right and kicked on. There was a slight current. The tide was coming in. It was helping me. But it was freezing me, too. It was coming in all the way from the Grand Banks. It was arctic. My skin was dead and slick. My breath was rasping. My heart was thumping. I started to worry about thermal shock. I thought back to books I had read about the t.i.tanic. The people who didn"t make it into the lifeboats all died within an hour.

But I wasn"t going to be in the water for an hour. And there were no actual icebergs around. And my rhythm was working. I was about level with the wall. The light spill stopped well short of me. I was naked and pale from the winter but I felt invisible. I pa.s.sed the wall. Halfway there. I kicked onward. Pounded away. Raised my wrist clear of the water and checked the time. I had been swimming for six minutes.

I swam for six more. Trod water and gasped for air and floated the bag ahead of me and looked back. I was well clear of the wall. I changed direction and headed for the sh.o.r.e.

Came up through slick mossy rocks onto a gritty beach. Threw the bag up ahead of me and crawled out of the water on my knees. I stayed on all fours for a whole minute, panting and shivering. My teeth were chattering wildly. I untied the bag. Found the towel.

Rubbed myself furiously. My arms were blue. My clothes snagged on my skin. I got my shoes on and stowed the Glock. Folded the bag and the towel and put them wet in my pocket. Then I ran, because I needed to get warm.

I ran for nearly ten minutes before I found the car. It was the old guy"s Taurus, gray in the moonlight. It was parked facing away from the house, all set to go, no delay. Duffy was a practical woman, that was for sure. I smiled again. The key was on the seat. I started the motor and eased away slowly. Kept the lights off and didn"t touch the brake until I was off the palm-shaped promontory and around the first curve on the road inland.

Then I lit up the headlights and turned up the heater and hit the gas hard.

I was outside the Portland docks fifteen minutes later. I left the Taurus parked on a quiet street a mile short of Beck"s warehouse. Walked the rest of the way. This was the moment of truth. If Doll"s body had been found the place would be in an uproar and I would melt away and never be seen again. If it hadn"t, I would live to fight another day.

The walk took the best part of twenty minutes. I saw n.o.body. No cops, no ambulances, no police tape, no medical examiners. No unexplained men in Lincoln Town Cars. I circled Beck"s warehouse itself on a wide radius. I glimpsed it through gaps and alleys.

The lights were all on in the office windows. But that was the way I had left it. Doll"s car was still there by the roller door. Exactly where I had left it.

I walked away from the building and came back toward it from a new angle, from the blind side where there was no window. I took the Glock out. Held it hidden low down by my leg. Doll"s car faced me. Beyond it on the left was the personnel door into the warehouse cubicle. Beyond that was the back office. I pa.s.sed the car and the door and dropped to the floor and crawled under the window. Raised my head and looked inside.

n.o.body there. The secretarial area was empty, too. All quiet. I breathed out and put the gun away. Retraced my steps to Doll"s car. Opened the driver"s door and popped the trunk. He was still in there. He hadn"t gone anywhere. I took his keys out of his pocket.

Closed the lid on him again and carried the keys in through the personnel door. Found the right key and locked it behind me.

I was willing to risk fifteen minutes. I spent five in the warehouse cubicle, five in the back office, and five in the secretarial area. I wiped everything I touched with the linen towel, so I wouldn"t leave any prints behind. I found no specific trace of Teresa Daniel.

Or of Quinn. But then, there were no names named anywhere. Everything was coded, people and merchandise alike. I came away with only one solid fact. Bizarre Bazaar sold several tens of thousands of individual items every year, to several hundred individual customers, in transactions totaling several tens of millions of dollars. Nothing made clear what the items were or who the customers were. Prices were cl.u.s.tered around three levels: some around fifty bucks, some around a thousand bucks, and some much more than that. There were no shipping records at all. No FedEx, no UPS, no postal service.

Clearly distribution was handled privately. But an insurance file I found told me that the corporation owned only two delivery trucks.

I walked back to the warehouse cubicle and shut the computer down. Retraced my steps to the entrance hallway and turned all the lights off as I went and left everything neat and tidy. I tested Doll"s keys in the front door and found the one that fit and clamped it in my palm. Turned back to the alarm box.

Doll was clearly trusted to lock up, which meant he knew how to set the alarm. I was sure Duke would do it himself, from time to time. And Beck, obviously. Probably one or two of the clerks as well. A whole bunch of people. One of them would have a lousy memory.

I looked at the notice board next to the box. Flipped through the memos where they were pinned three-deep. Found a four-figure code written on the bottom of a two-year-old note from the city about new parking regulations. I entered it on the keypad. The red light started flashing and the box started beeping. I smiled. It never fails. Computer pa.s.swords, unlisted numbers, alarm codes, someone always writes them down.

I went out the front door and closed it behind me. The beeping stopped. I locked it and walked around the corner and slid into Doll"s Lincoln. Started it up and drove it away. I left it in a downtown parking garage. It could have been the same one that Susan Duffy had photographed. I wiped everything I had touched and locked it up and put the keys in my pocket. I thought about setting it on fire. It had gas in the tank and I still had two dry kitchen matches. Burning cars is fun. And it would increase the pressure on Beck. But in the end I just walked away. It was probably the right decision. It would take most of a day for anybody to grow aware of it parked there. Most of another day for them to decide to do something about it. Then another day for the cops to respond. They would trace the plate and come up against one of Beck"s sh.e.l.l corporations. So they would tow it away, pending further inquiry. They would bust open the trunk for sure, worried about terrorist bombs or because of the smell, but by then a whole bunch of other deadlines would have been reached and I would be long gone.

I walked back to the Taurus and drove it to within a mile of the house. Returned Duffy"s compliment by U-turning and leaving it facing the right way for her. Then I went through my previous routine in reverse. I stripped on the gritty beach and packed the garbage bag.

Waded into the sea. I wasn"t keen to do it. It was just as cold. But the tide had turned. It was going my way. Even the ocean was cooperating. I swam the same twelve minutes.

Looped right around the end of the wall and came ash.o.r.e behind the garage block. I was shaking with cold and my teeth were chattering again. But I felt good. I dried myself as well as I could on the damp linen rag and dressed fast before I froze. Left the Glock and the spare magazines and Doll"s set of keys hidden with the PSM and the chisel and the bradawl. Folded the bag and the towel and wedged them under a rock a yard away. Then I headed for my drainpipe. I was still shivering.

The climb was easier going up than coming down. I walked my hands up the pipe and my feet up the wall. Got level with my window and grabbed the sill with my left hand.

Jumped my feet across to the stone ledge. Brought my right hand over and pushed the window up. Hauled myself inside as quietly as I could.

The room was icy. The window had been open for hours. I closed it tight and stripped again. My clothes were damp. I laid them out on the radiator and headed for the bathroom. Took a long hot shower. Then I locked myself in there with my shoes. It was exactly six in the morning. They would be picking up the Taurus. Probably Eliot and the old guy would be doing it. Probably Duffy would have stayed back at base. I took the email device out and sent: Duffy? Ninety seconds later she came back with: Here. You OK? I sent: Fine. Check these names anywhere you can, inc. with MP Powell-Angel Doll, poss. a.s.sociate Paulie, both poss. ex-military.

She sent: Will do.

Then I sent the question that had been on my mind for five and a half hours: What is Teresa Daniel"s real name?

There was the usual ninety-second delay, and then she came back with: Teresa Justice.

CHAPTER 6

No point in going to bed, so I just stood at the window and watched the dawn. It was soon in full flow. The sun came up over the sea. The air was fresh and clear. I could see fifty miles. I watched an arctic tern coming in low from the north. It skimmed the rocks as it pa.s.sed them. I guessed it was looking for a place to build a nest. The low sun behind it threw shadows as big as vultures. Then it gave up on the search for shelter and looped and wheeled and swooped away over the water and tumbled into the ocean. It came out a long moment later and silver droplets of freezing water trailed it back into the sky. It had nothing in its beak. But it flew on like it was happy enough. It was better adapted than me.

There wasn"t much to see after that. There were a few herring gulls far in the distance. I squinted against the glare and looked for signs of whales or dolphins and saw nothing. I watched mats of seaweed drift around on circular currents. At six-fifteen I heard Duke"s footsteps in the corridor and the click of my lock. He didn"t come in. He just tramped away again. I turned and faced the door and took a deep breath. Day thirteen, Thursday.

Maybe that was better than day thirteen falling on a Friday. I wasn"t sure. Whatever, bring it on. I took another breath and walked out through the door and headed down the stairs.

Nothing was the same as the morning before. Duke was fresh and I was tired. Paulie wasn"t around. I went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt gym and found n.o.body there. Duke didn"t stay for breakfast. He disappeared somewhere. Richard Beck came in to eat in the kitchen. There was just him and me at the table. The mechanic wasn"t there. The cook stayed busy at the stove. The Irish girl came in and out from the dining room. She was moving fast. There was a buzz in the air. Something was happening.

"Big shipment coming in," Richard Beck said. "It"s always like this. Everybody gets excited about the money they"re going to make."

"You heading back to school?" I asked him.