The First 48 Read online

  “You are making a mistake,” he said. “We’re talking about libel and slander.”

  “I know my facts,” Jane said. “I have the credit card statements and the witnesses who can corroborate it. So what do you have to say? Anything about the love of your family and country? Or maybe just of brass poles?”

  Someone was beside Jane now. An angry scowl. A quivering bleached-blond ponytail.

  “Senator? I’m sorry,” the attendant said, “this woman said she was sent down by your office.”

  “Remove her, please,” Gleason said. A shiny line of perspiration was now evident along the furrowed ridges of his brow.

  “You’ll have to leave,” the attendant said, taking Jane by the arm.

  Jane snapped free. “I take it that’s a ‘No comment.’”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said, laughing. “I hope you like being unemployed.”

  “I have a story to write.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Bob Thorne set down his book and got up out of the chair where he did his reading. He wore a white tank top undershirt, a pair of light blue boxers, and dark socks. This was how he spent most of his time, reading in his underwear. He dressed only when he went out.

  His books lined the walls of his living quarters, floor to ceiling, covering almost every inch of the painted cinder-block walls. They were the finest works of literature the human race had ever produced and they spoke to him in four different languages, led by Voltaire, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Márquez. He had read them all and was halfway through reading them again. According to the actuary tables, he would have the opportunity to read them no more than three times. At that point, he would be ninety-eight.

  The kitchen was spotless. That made sense. He never used it. He lived entirely below the earth’s surface. He came out once a day before dawn to walk the perimeter of his grounds for an hour, then shoot at the range in the detached garage for thirty minutes. As the sun came up, he retired to his quarters.

  Every meal he ate came from a can. The distilled water he drank came in one-gallon plastic jugs. His pantry was quite orderly. He went to any single store no more than once a year. No one knew who he was. The last person who could identify him had died three years ago of a sudden and unexpected coronary.

  He wasn’t being self-important in considering himself the perfect killing machine. He had proven his worth through the years. There were very few of his kind anymore. Young people were too brash. Too self-centered. They wanted people to know who they were. What they did. Bob Thorne was a ghost.

  The phone rang.

  He crossed the room and picked up the phone on his desk.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Thorne?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was told to call this number and mention the King of Clubs.”

  “Yes, of course,” Thorne said, flicking a switch by his phone to secure the line.

  “Now?”

  “Of course. You are free to talk. Our line is clear.”

  “There’s a reporter from the Washington Post who has some very damaging things to say about the King of Clubs. He is very concerned. I was thinking you could clean up the entire matter. Everything. I think everything needs to just . . . go away. Right away.”

  “As in . . . today?”

  “Yes,” the voice said. “Tomorrow would be too late. It could get messy and it could be a disaster.”

  “Everything is possible,” Thorne said.

  “The King of Clubs can pay you. Money isn’t an issue.”

  “Everything has already been taken care of,” Thorne said. “My job is to do a favor. Tell me about the problem.”

  The voice did.

  Thorne’s clients were few, but their needs were usually great. That was his job.

  He sat at his desk when he hung up and pondered the King of Clubs. Wasn’t there a key vote in the Intelligence Committee back in ’92? Something about Colombia? No matter.

  He found the girl’s address by dialing directory assistance. He wasn’t fond of computers, didn’t trust them. He wrote small neat letters in a pocket notebook and found a map of D.C. in the cabinet beside his desk. He traced his pen along the route from where he was in rural Maryland to where she was, jotting down directions for himself in his notebook as he went.

  When he was finished, he took the master list out of his desk drawer. Using a ruler, he put a line through the King of Clubs. Fifty-two cards in the deck when he began. Only the Seven of Diamonds and the Three of Clubs remained. After that, he would get a phone call. He would go to Grand Cayman and cash out an account for $2 million. He would change his identity for the last time and buy a small time-share on St. Martin. The only things he would take with him were the books.

  He went to his closet. Three suits hung neatly. A pair of khaki pants. Two shirts. A raincoat. On the floor were two pairs of polished shoes. One black. One brown. Rubbers. Also a pair of work boots. Matching belts hung from a hook on the door. He chose gray and black. The blue shirt. No tie; domestic work didn’t require a tie. He would, however, need the coat and rubbers—the forecast called for rain.

  A can of Lysol stood next to the shoes; its blue plastic top was free of dust. He gave each black shoe a gentle blast before slipping his feet inside with an ivory shoehorn he’d purchased many years ago in Cambodia. Next he went to his gun drawer and removed the .22 revolver. Small. No jamming. He filled the cylinder with hand-loaded cartridges. Quiet. Under his other arm he strapped the Walther PPK. Efficient, with adequate firepower in the event of an emergency. He’d never had to use it outside his shooting range.

  His thin gray hair was already combed neatly through with pomade. A gray felt hat with a black band went on top of that. Suit coat on, he went upstairs, stopping at the metal door to peer through the fish-eye lens into the kitchen. It was impossible that someone could be there without having tripped the series of warning systems encircling his hundred-acre compound. But Bob had been able to reach the age of sixty-seven because he had always considered even the impossibilities.

  He walked outside into the sunshine, blinking as he felt for the clip-on sunglasses in his breast pocket. He fastened them onto the black plastic rims of his bifocal glasses and crossed the driveway under the eaves of a massive red maple. The tree whispered to him as he crouched down and opened the garage door. A nondescript Buick Regal.

  He set the coat and rubbers on the passenger seat and set off down his long straight driveway. Once he was through the electric gates and out on the open road, he indulged himself with a little whistling. His own rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. The approach of death. He had never failed on an assignment. He had never even come close.

  CHAPTER 11

  Conrad Duffy of Duffy & McKeen had once been presented to the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. He was part of a small delegation invited to tea. The library where it was served was carved from black cherry, a rare material that gave life to the carved men and creatures in the burgundy plains of its panels. To preserve the memory of that day, Duffy tried to replicate the feel of that place in his firm’s main conference room. From the center of that room, amid the swirl of wood, hung a Lalique crystal chandelier. Mark Allen found himself not listening, but staring at the seam of a particular bauble, fascinated that from the empty space of glass could come an explosion of colors.

  Today, Mark Allen wore a dark blue Armani suit and a two-hundred-dollar burnt orange tie. When he realized the room had gone quiet, he leaned back in his leather chair and unbuttoned his jacket. They were waiting for him to speak. He glared back at the half-dozen attorneys assembled around the massive table. When you didn’t know what to do in a meeting, you glared. He’d learned that from his mentor.

  “We’re talking about eleven figures,” Mark Allen said, leaning forward with his hands flat on the wood. “Billions. That says it all. It has its own set of ethics. If you have to step on someone’s throat . . . you do it, or it will be done to you . . .

  “I
want you to remember this: If we get this contract, it’s more than a deal. It will change the balance of power in corporate America, and this firm is going to be a part of it.”

  The meeting ended on that note, and he returned to his office. Mark Allen hadn’t ended up in the offices of Duffy & McKeen by chance. You didn’t just get to a midpoint in your career and happen to find yourself there. You had to reach for it. If influence was the currency of politics, Duffy & McKeen was a mint. Its partners included six former senators, ten former congressmen, and thirty-two high-ranking members of past administrations.

  Mark was there for different reasons, but his development was equally impressive. West Point. Four years as an officer in Military Intelligence. Then back to school. Men in their early thirties didn’t usually move other men and companies like chess pieces, but Mark Allen did.

  He made phone calls until the light coming through the window began to fade. Rain pattered on the sill, and as he packed his laptop into his briefcase, he called for a car. Dinner was at eight at the Capital Grill. After a thick red steak and two bottles of Franciscan Magnificat with the senator from California, he threw his coat over his head and dashed through the rain into the waiting Town Car.

  He sprinted from the car up the steps and into his brownstone. It was a spartan apartment, with a few pieces of rented furniture. Mark looked down at the floor and thought about finding a cleaning service. Without bothering to remove his wet shoes, he grabbed a can of Sprite from the refrigerator, loosened his tie, and sat down on the couch to watch the news. He carefully watched an ad for a Porsche. That was one thing he planned on getting. Then one day, a yacht. For parties with important people. A helicopter, too. He wanted to have meetings and land on the tops of buildings. He wanted someone with an umbrella waiting for him in the rain. The real rain had dried from his face by the time he went upstairs.

  His mind was on a shower, but the small red eye on his monitoring device glowered at him. He flipped off his shoes without untying them and sat down at the table. He put on the headphones, went back to the beginning of the recorded disk, and took a thin notebook and a pen out of his briefcase.

  Over the months of listening to what went on inside Gleason’s office, he had become adept at being able to advance through the mundane conversations. It was just midnight when he got to the part of the disk where Gleason stormed into his office irate and made his mysterious phone call to Bob Thorne.

  When Mark heard the words “go away,” his heart grew tight and his breathing short. He jotted them down. They were going to kill her. When he heard “Tomorrow would be too late,” he ripped off the headset, stuffed the notebook back into his briefcase, threw on his running shoes, and dashed out the door.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jane got up and changed the music. It wasn’t happening with Holst’s Planets. It hadn’t happened with Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor. John Coltrane was next. The words were stuck. Maybe it was the ideas.

  She had no distractions. The phone was unplugged, her cell phone turned off. She never wrote at home. She always wrote on the clock and in the chaos of the newsroom. But she wanted this filed tomorrow morning. She didn’t want Herman to pull the damned thing at the last second because she hadn’t dotted some i or crossed a t. She just took the whole thing home with her. She’d work all night if she had to to get it all straight in her head.

  They were clearing the lead column on page one for her. She had to make this the best piece she’d ever written.

  There was one distraction. The image of Mark Allen kept popping up, unwanted graffiti on the inside of her mind. What was his deal in all this? What was his agenda? Everyone had an agenda.

  She huffed out loud and changed into a pair of shorts and sneakers, muttering as she tied them. She pulled a nylon shell over the top of her favorite Syracuse basketball T-shirt and flipped up the hood. The cell phone went into her pocket.

  This was what she needed. It didn’t matter that the rain was spattering the glass in an unending staccato. It might cleanse her mind.

  In the front hall of the brownstone, the warm smell of incense and spices filled the air. She considered the door to the young Indian doctor’s apartment, and thought she heard the muffled sound of laughter. Out on the front step, there was a single silent flash of lightning. Not chain lightning, but a glow from horizon to horizon. Heat lightning. The rain poured down, mincing the puddles and flooding the street. The glow of the streetlights was muted by the torrent, and the yellow rectangles of light coming from the front windows of the apartment building across the street were blurred.

  A single car crawled down the street, pushing cones of light that swarmed with rain. It slowed in front of her steps, and she thought she saw the glint of someone’s eyeglasses from within. The vague, gray form of a face. Someone looking. Then the car drove on, its taillights bleeding into the night.

  Jane went the other way, for Potomac Park along the river. If it had been nice, she would have run the streets. But the nasty weather would keep the darkness’s usual dangers under cover, even this late at night. She preferred the long slow winding path along the edge of the park, where she wouldn’t have to stop for traffic lights.

  She looked back over her shoulder for the car. It was gone. Strange. Something told her to go back. She slowed her pace, then stopped. She turned to search the street. Rain pattered off her hood. Her socks were already wet and heavy. She felt a wave of disgust. Childish fears of the dark.

  Growing up, she was afraid of swimming in the lake after dark. Irrational. She’d beaten that by forcing herself to endure small doses. Then she’d increased them, like poison, until she was immune.

  She turned for the park, running hard now. Pushing herself. Splashing through the puddles. By the time she got there, she was winded. The smell of rain and warm pavement was drowned out by the tangy scent of worms. She slowed her pace and started up the path that ran alongside the road. She caught herself looking back over her shoulder again. Something darted into the trees.

  Jane turned and jogged backward, looking. Was it a trick? Adrenaline coursed through her veins. More foolishness.

  When the path split off, she forced herself to veer left, into the heart of the trees. There were lights along the path, but the space between them was like ink. Her heart rate went up and down according to the level of illumination. She was going to force herself to be brave. When she hit the bottom of the loop, she started to run fast. She had done it. Now she wanted to get out. The dark shadows between the trees seemed to sway. The rain hissed.

  She was almost back to the road when something moved in front of her. She stopped. This time she was certain. A shape. Someone had scurried off the path in front of her. She stopped and stared. Then, in a panic, she shot into the shadows herself, ducking behind a tree, her hands pressed against its thick rough trunk. The ripe smell of wet bark filled her nostrils. Her heart was a jackhammer against her ribs.

  She had to move. She went farther into the trees, using the light of the path. It filtered weakly through their limbs, guiding her toward the street. She wanted to cry out, but there was no one there to help and she knew if she did, he would only find her. She knew it was a man by the cunning and deliberate way he had moved. Crouched like a Neanderthal.

  When she saw movement again, it was no more than twenty feet from her. For an instant she froze. She reached inside her jacket pocket. Her cell phone. She yanked it free and felt for the buttons as she bolted for the light of the path. She flew across the grass.

  She was too horrified to scream. Her mouth was open, but she couldn’t get enough air to come out. She couldn’t get enough air to come in, either. She was choking. She felt him behind her, reaching. The phone slipped from her hand. Her legs ached. She felt him grab her shell. She tripped and went headfirst into the darkness. She hit something immovable. Stars exploded. Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 13

  The green water stretched out in front of the boat’s bow like a
flat creamy sheet, unspoiled by the usual traffic. But then, the sudden break in the thick gray clouds had been unexpected. Tom knew the forecast called for rain, and rain it had for the better part of the day.

  For him, the summer was never long enough, and he knew he would be stuck inside a courtroom for most of the next week. He relished the smooth feel of the cool water against his skin and the breathtaking sight of the green hills, rising loftily on either side of the emerald lake. With binoculars, he could see his house.

  He closed his eyes and felt the gentle rock of his new boat, a cold beer in his hand. November would be here in a blink. The landscape would fade to drab browns and pewter after the briefest flash of fiery reds and oranges.

  With the new client he met today and his retainer, Tom would now owe Mike only a thousand dollars, and what was that between friends? Mike hadn’t answered the phone, but this development was still cause to celebrate. Even alone. He stretched his legs on the cushioned seat and looked across the bow. Ellen.

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  Tom felt a dizzying ache.

  Ellen disappeared. The empty bow swayed gently. Time sometimes shifted for Tom. It was confusing, and it didn’t only happen when he drank. This was his first beer, and he’d barely nicked the Knob Creek.

  There was a phone call last night. Late. Tom had been pulled from his slumber by the sharp ring of his cell phone. He’d rolled over, knocked it to the floor along with two beer cans, and put on the light. By the time he found the phone, he had missed the call. The Caller ID showed a private number. Jane had a private number. Tom dialed Jane’s cell phone. He got her voice mail. He called her apartment and got the machine there, too. When he hung up, there was a message on his voice mail. He retrieved it. Nothing. A low hissing that could have been static, or rain, but no voice.

  He hadn’t spoken to Jane since she’d left and she hadn’t returned his three phone calls from earlier. Sometimes he went a whole week without hearing from her, and given their harsh words he hadn’t expected a call anytime soon.