Strangers

Page 58

So who's on to me? Jack wondered.
He focused on the fratellanza warehouse robbery that he and Mort and Tommy Sung had pulled off December 3. Was the mafia after him? When they wanted to find someone, those boys had more contacts, sources, determination, and sheer perseverance than the FBI. And the fratellanza would most likely not have taken the twentyfive thousand, leaving it as dilominous notice that they wanted more than the money he had stolen from them. It was also in character for the fratellanza to leave a teaser like the postcard, because those guys enjoyed making a target sweat a lot before they finally pulled the trigger.
On the other hand, even if the mob tracked him down, then somehow searched back through his criminal career to see who else he had hit, they would not have gone to the trouble of acquiring cards from the Tranquility Motel just to put the fear of God in him. If they had wanted to leave an upsetting teaser in the safedeposit box, they would have left a photo of the warehouse that he had robbed in New Jersey.
So it was not the mafia. Then who? Damn it, who?
The tiny cubicle began to seem even smaller than it was. Jack felt claustrophobic and vulnerable. As long as he was in the bank, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He stuffed the twentyfive thousand into his overcoat pockets, no longer intending to give away any of it; suddenly, it had become his escape money. He put the postcard in his wallet, closed the empty box, and rang the buzzer for the attendant.
Two minutes later, he was outside, drawing deep breaths of the freezing January air, studying the people on Fifth Avenue for one who might be tailing him. He saw no one suspicious.
For a moment he stood rocklike in the river of people that flowed around him. He wanted to get out of the city and the state as quickly as possible, flee to an unlikely destination, where they would not look for him. Whoever they were. Yet he was not entirely sure that flight was necessary. In Ranger training, he had been taught never to act until he understood why he was acting and until he knew what he hoped to achieve by his actions. Besides, fear of his faceless enemy was outweighed by curiosity; he needed to know who he was up against, how they had broken his various covers, and what they wanted from him.
Outside the Citibank Building, Jack hailed a cab and went to the corner of Wall Street and William Street, in the heart of the financial district, where he had six safedeposit boxes in six banks. He went to five of them, from each of which he collected twentyfive thousand dollars and a postcard of the Tranquility Motel.
He decided to stop after the fifth, because his coat pockets were already bulging with $125,000, a sufficiently dangerous sum to be carrying, and because, by now, he knew beyond a doubt that his other six phony identities and clandestine safedeposit boxes had been found out as well. He had enough money with which to travel, and he was not particularly worried about leaving the remaining $150,000 in the other six boxes. For one thing, Jack had four million in his Swiss accounts; and for another thing, the distributor of the postcards would already have taken the available money if that had been his intention.
By now, he'd had time to think about that motel out in Nevada, and he had begun to realize something was strange about the time that he had spent at the place. He had remained there for three days, relaxing, enjoying the quiet and the scenery. But now, for the first time, it seemed to him that he would have done no such thing. Not with so much cash in the trunk of his rental car. Not when he had already been away from New York (and Jenny) for two weeks. He would have driven straight home from Reno. Now that he was forced to contemplate it, the threeday stay at the Tranquility Motel did not make much sense.
Another taxi conveyed him to his Fifth Avenue apartment building, where he arrived shortly before eleven. He promptly telephoned Elite Flights, a company that chartered small jets, with whom he had dealt previously, and he was relieved to discover that, fortuitously, they had an unhooked Lear available for departure at his convenience.
He took the twentyfive thousand from the secret compartment in the back of his bedroom closet. With the funds he had removed from the safedeposit boxes, he now had $150,000 in immediate operating capital, enough to deal with virtually any contingency that might arise.
He hurriedly packed three suitcases, distributing a few clothes in each, but leaving most of the space for other items. He stowed away two handguns: a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum, chambered for the .357 Magnum cartridge but also capable of firing .38 Special cartridges with considerably less kick; and a .32 Beretta Model 70, its stubby barrel grooved to accept a screwon, pipetype silencer, of which Jack included two. He also took an Uzi submachine gun, which he'd illegally modified for full automatic fire, plus plenty of ammunition.
Jack's newly acquired guilt had substantially transformed him during the past fortyeight hours, but it had not overwhelmed him to such an extent that he was incapable of dealing violently with those who might deal violently with him. His determination to be an honest and upstanding citizen did not interfere with his instinct for selfpreservation. And considering his background, no one was better prepared to preserve himself than Jack Twist.
Besides, after eight years of alienation and loneliness, he had begun to rejoin society, had begun to hope for a normal life. He would not let anyone destroy what might be his last chance for happiness.
He also packed the portable SLICKS computer, which he had used to get through the armored transport's sophisticated electronic lock the night before last in Connecticut. In addition, he decided he might need a Police Lock Release Gun, a tool that could instantly open any type of pintumbler lockmushroom, spool, or regularwithout damaging the mechanism, and which was sold only to lawenforcement agencies, And a Star Tron MK 202A, a compact, handheld “night vision” device that could also be riflemounted. And a few other things.
Although he distributed the heaviest weapons and equipment equally among the three large suitcases, none of the bags was light when he finally closed and locked them. Any one who helped him with his luggage might wonder about the contents, but no one would ask embarrassing questions or raise an alarm. That was the advantage of leasing a Lear jet for the journey: He would not be required to pass through airport security, and no one would inspect his baggage.
From his apartment, he taxied to La Guardia.
The waiting Lear would take him to Salt Lake City, Utah, the nearest major airport to Elko, a shade closer than Reno International, and a lot closer if you considered the necessity of overflying to Reno and then doubling back in a conventionalengine commuter plane to Elko. Elite Flights had told him that Reno was anticipating a major snowstorm that might close them down later in the day, and the same was true of the two smaller fields in southern Idaho that were capable of handling Learsize jets. But the weather forecast for Salt Lake City was good throughout the day. At Jack's request, Elite was already arranging the lease of a conventionalengine plane from a Utah company to carry him from Salt Lake to the little county airport in Elko. Although it was in the easternmost fourth of Nevada, Elko was still within the Pacific time zone, so he would benefit from a gain of three hours, though he did not think he would arrive in Elko much before nightfall.
That was all right. He'd need darkness for what he was planning.
To Jack, the taunting postcards, retrieved from his safedeposit boxes, implied there were people in Nevada who had learned everything worth knowing about his criminal life. The cards seemed to be saying that he could reach those people through the Tranquility Motel or perhaps find them in residence there. The postcard was an invitation. Or a summons. Either way, he could ignore it only at his peril.
He did not know if he was being followed to La Guardia; he did not bother looking for a tail. If his apartment phone was tapped, they knew he was coming the moment he called Elite Flights. He wanted them to see him approaching openly, for then they might be offguard when, on arrival in Elko, he suddenly shook loose of them and went underground.
Monday morning, after breakfast, Dom and Ginger went into Elko, to the offices of the Sentinel, the county's only news paper. The biggest town in the county, Elko boasted a population of less than ten thousand, so its newspaper's offices were not housed in a gleaming glass highrise but in a humble onestory concreteblock building on a quiet street.
Like most papers, the Sentinel provided access to its backissue files to anyone with legitimate research needs, though permission for the use of the files was granted judiciously.
In spite of the financial success of his first novel, Dom still had difficulty identifying himself as a writer. To his own ears, he sounded pretentious and phony, though he realized his uneasiness was a holdover from his days as an excessively selfeffacing Milquetoast.
The receptionist, Brenda Hennerling, did not recognize his name, but when he mentioned the title of his novel that Random House had just shipped to the stores, she said, "It's the bookclub selection this month! You wrote it? Really?"
She had ordered it a month ago from the Literary Guild, and it had just arrived in the mail. She was (she said) an avid reader, two books a week, and it was truly a thrill to meet a genuine novelist. Her enthusiasm only added to Dom's embarrassment. He was of a mind with Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said, "The important thing is the tale, the welltold tale, not he who tells it."
The Sentinel's backissue files were kept in a narrow, windowless chamber. There were two desks with typewriters, a microfilm reader, a file of microfilm spools, and six tall filing cabinets with oversize drawers containing those editions of the newspaper that had not yet been transferred to film. The exposed concreteblock walls were painted pale gray, and the acoustictile ceiling was gray, too, and the fluorescent lights shed a cold glare. Dom had the odd sensation that they were in a submarine, far beneath the surface of the sea.
After Brenda Hennerling explained the filing system to them and left them alone to do their work, Ginger said, "I'm so caught up in our problems that I keep forgetting you're a famous author."
“So do I,” Dom said, reading the labels on the filing cabinets that held issues of past Sentinels. “But of course, I'm not famous.”
"Soon will be. It's a shame: With all that's happening to us, you're getting no chance to savour the publication of your first novel."
He shrugged. "This isn't a picnic for any of us. You've had to put an entire medical career on hold."
"Yes, but now I know I'll be able to go back to medicine once we've dug to the bottom of this," Ginger said, as if there was no doubt they would triumph over their enemies. By now, Dom knew that conviction and determination were as much a part of her as the blueness of her eyes. “But this is your first book.”
Dom had not yet recovered from his embarrassment at being treated like a celebrity by the receptionist. Now Ginger's kind comments kept a blush on his cheeks. However, this was not the mark of embarrassment; it was an indication of the intense pleasure he took in being the object of her concern. No woman had ever affected him as this one did.
Together, they went through the file drawers and removed the pertinent back issues of the Sentinel. They would not need to use the microfilm reader, for the newspaper was running two years behind in the transferral to film. They withdrew a full week's editions, beginning with Saturday, July 7, of the summer before last, and took them to one of the desks, where they both pulled up chairs.
Although the unremembered event that they had witnessed, and the possible contamination, and the closure of I80 had happened on Friday night, July 6, the Saturday paper carried no report of the toxic spill. The Sentinel was primarily a source of local and state news and, though it included some national and international material, was not interested in fastbreaking stories. Its halls would never ring with that dramatic cry, “Stop press!” There would be no lastminute recomposition of the front page. The pace of life in Elko County was rural, relaxed, sensible, and no one felt a burning need to be breathlessly uptotheminute on anything. The Sentinel was put to bed late in the evening, for distribution in the morning; therefore, since no Sunday edition was published, the story of the toxic spill and the closure of I-80 did not appear until the edition of Monday, July 9.
But Monday's and Tuesday's editions were emblazoned with urgent headlines: TOXIC SPILL CLOSES- 80, and ARMY ESTABLISHES QUARANTINE ZONE, and NERVE GAS LEAKING FROM DAMAGED TRUCK?, and ARMY SAYS EVERYONE EVACUATED FROM DANGER ZONE, and WHERE ARE EVACUEES?, and SHENKFIELD ARMY TESTING GROUNDS: WHAT REALLY GOES ON THERE?, and
- 80 CLOSURE ENTERS FOURTH DAY, and CLEANUP ALMOST FINISHED; HIGHWAY OPEN BY NOON.
For both Dom and Ginger, it was eerie to read about these events that had transpired during days when they remembered nothing more than relaxing quietly at the Tranquility Motel. As Dom read about the crisis, he became convinced Ginger's theory was correct; it seemed obvious that the mindcontrol technicians would have needed an extra week or two in order to have incorporated this elaborate toxicspill cover story into the phony memories of both Elko County locals and passersthrough, and there was no way they could have kept the highway closed and the area sealed tight for that long.
The edition of Wednesday, July 11, continued the saga: I80 OPENS!, and QUARANTINE REMOVED: NO LONGTERM CONTAMINATION, and FIRST EVACUEES LOCATED: THEY SAW NOTHIN(;.
Editions of the Sentinel, distinctly a smalltown paper, averaged between sixteen and thirtytwo pages. During those days in July, most of its news space was given to reports of the toxic crisis, for this event had drawn reporters from all over the country, and the lowkey Sentinel found itself at the center of a big story. Poring over that wealth of material, Dom and Ginger discovered a lot that was pertinent to their quest and that would help them plan their next move.
For one thing, the degree of security imposed by the United States Army was soberly instructive of the lengths to which they would go to keep the lid on the truth. Although it was not strictly within their authority to do so, Army units attached to Shenkfield had established roadblocks and closed a tenmile stretch of I-80 immediately after the accident; they had not even informed the Elko County Sheriff or the Nevada State Police of the crisis until they had secured the quarantine zone. That was a startling breach of standard procedure. Throughout the emergency, the sheriff and state police complained with increasing vehemence that the Army was freezing them out of every aspect of crisis management and usurping civilian authority; state and local police were neither included in the maintenance of the quarantine line nor consulted on essential contingency planning for the possibility that increased winds or other factors might spread the nerve gas beyond the initial area of danger. Clearly, the military trusted only its own people to keep the secret of what was actually happening in the quarantine zone.