When Gage returned to the Adirondack Plaza Hotel garage after dropping off Elaine Hennessy, he was ready for whoever would step out of the shadows. If Strubb hadn’t succeeded in deflecting Gilbert, he’d have to escalate his efforts to find out what Gage had been doing and what he’d learned—and Gage’s ride on the elevator might be replaced by one to the riverbank.
Gage had driven a thirty-mile loop northwest through Schenectady, then back toward the Hudson. On the way, he’d pulled into a truck stop and bought a flashlight. He searched the undercarriage of his car until he located a GPS tracking device that he’d guessed Gilbert had installed. He pulled it free and stomped it with his heel.
As Gage headed back toward the highway, he telephoned his surveillance chief in San Francisco and told him to get on a plane for New York to help him arrange for countermeasures, and then continued down along the river.
Gage drove to the top level of the hotel garage, called for an elevator, reached inside to press the button for the first floor, then ran to the corner stairs and raced down to meet it. He wanted to come up behind whoever might be waiting for him to come down.
He eased the first floor door open, but found himself behind the elevator shaft. He heard the doors slide open and then close. He tried to stay in the shadows as he snuck between cars and along the walls until he was able to get a view of the front of the elevators.
The area was clear except for a woman staring up at the digital floor readout numbers, shivering despite the heavy hooded coat enveloping her.
Another elevator opened. Two men in trench coats got out. Both gave her sideways glances, then one grinned at the other and they walked past her and toward the lobby. She didn’t get into the elevator. She just stood there, rocking back and forth and stamping her feet. It struck Gage that the fidgeting might have been less from cold than from agitation or urgency.
After scanning the floor, Gage came around the van and walked toward her. She turned at the sound of his footsteps.
It was Vicky, her eyes bloodshot and her face raw red.
She took two steps, intercepted him, and then grabbed his upper arm with her gloved hands.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, peering up at him. Tears glistened on her checks. “I’m sorry about how I acted today.” She leaned her forehead against his chest. “Please. If I don’t tell someone, I’ll go crazy.”
Gage reached for her shoulders and turned her so he could see her face.
“Tell me what?”
“I think I killed my father.”
Gage recognized that this was the voice of guilt, not of fact, but that it needed to be heard nonetheless.
“What makes you think so?” Gage asked.
“I told them where he was.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
Vicky looked down and sighed. “I don’t know.”
Gage pointed toward the glass double doors leading to the lobby.
“Let’s go inside,” he said, and then led her into the hotel and toward the coffee shop.
“Can we talk in your room?” she asked, as they passed the reception desk.
Gage shook his head. “I don’t want to be seen taking a girl your age up there.”
His real reason was that she was too erratic, and maybe too delusional, for him to risk being alone with her. Her self-accusation could easily mutate and turn outward, and he didn’t want to become the target.
He guided her to a table along the wall opposite the bank of windows facing the night-lit State Street.
A middle-aged waitress walked up, glancing back and forth between the two of them. Her eyes held for a moment on Vicky’s flushed face, then her brows furrowed, as though she’d decided that Gage was responsible for the distress on Vicky’s face.
When Vicky looked down at the menu, Gage mouthed the words “boy trouble” to the waitress.
She nodded, then rolled her eyes as if to say she’d been through the same thing with her own kids, then took his order for two teas.
“Tell me what happened,” Gage said, after the waitress walked away.
“A year ago an FBI agent stopped me as I was leaving school. He told me that he was worried about my father, afraid that he might get hurt because of his obsession with Hani Ibrahim, and asked me to spy on him.”
Vicky reached for her napkin and smoothed it out on the paper placemat.
“At first I didn’t want to do it. But then I watched my father get more and more frantic, so I called the agent and began to pass on to him things I overheard my father say or whatever I found in his office.”
Gage saw that the napkin was damp with sweat.
“I only learned about the places my father traveled after he got back.” She swallowed hard and crushed the napkin in her hands. “Except Marseilles.”
The waitress arrived and set down two pots of hot water and a selection of tea bags. She slipped Vicky a pocket-sized packet of tissues and then turned and walked away.
“And you think the FBI has something to do with his death,” Gage said, “by having him killed or badgering him into suicide?”
“That’s what I was afraid of, and I’m too terrified to tell my mother what I did.” She shrugged and her eyes went blank. “But now I don’t know what to think.”
“What changed?”
She focused again on Gage. “I started to worry when you showed up and what you might know or tell my mother, so I tried to call the agent earlier tonight, but he didn’t answer his cell phone. Then I called the FBI’s emergency number.” Vicky’s eyes again filled with tears. She stifled a sob. “And they told me they’d never heard of him.”
“What name had he given you?”
“Anthony Gilbert.”